On September 15, 2026, the CLARITY Act failed its Senate cloture vote 49 to 50, eleven votes short of the 60 it needed. Polymarket's odds of a crypto market-structure law passing in 2026 closed the day at 7%, down from 82% in February. However, within ten days the SEC had done part of the bill's work on its own. On September 17, it issued a five-year exemption that lets tokenized US stocks trade in automated market maker (AMM) pools, the liquidity pools decentralized exchanges run on. On September 25, it published guidance on when a token on a working network is not considered a security. With Congress out of the picture until 2027 at the earliest, the SEC is now writing the rules itself, and the first ones cover the tokenized-stock venues we wrote about last month.

The CLARITY Act failed on the issue that had held it up since spring, an enforceable ban on the president and senior officials profiting from crypto while they set its rules. However, the SEC already had most of the pieces in motion. "Regulation Crypto Assets", proposed on August 18, gives tokens that meet its conditions a safe harbor from being treated as investment contracts. A September 1 proposal lets transfer agents keep a company's shareholder record on a public blockchain. Neither is final yet, and neither says where tokenized securities can trade, which is the gap the September 17 order fills.

The order issued on September 17 lets a "Tokenized Securities Venue" run AMM pools for tokenized US-listed stocks on a public blockchain without registering as a stock exchange. The liquidity providers in those pools do not have to register as dealers either. It comes with three conditions: 1) only verified wallets can trade, so the pools are permissioned even though the blockchain is not; 2) the token must give its holder "the same rights and privileges as does traditional NMS stock," dividends and votes included, so tokens that only track a price do not qualify; and 3) trading in each stock is capped. The cap is a share of the stock's average daily volume on US exchanges in the prior month: 0.25% for Tier 1 stocks (the S&P 500, the Russell 1000 and the most liquid ETFs) and 2.5% for Tier 2, which is every other stock. A venue's first breach in a stock is forgiven, but every later one stops trading in that stock for three months. The exemption runs to September 2031, and the Commission is taking comments on making it a permanent rule.

What the order really does is open a compliant way for US investors to trade tokenized stocks onchain. Until now that market has been offshore: Robinhood's Stock Tokens, xStocks and Ondo's tokenized stocks are all sold only outside the US and cannot be offered to US persons. Under the order, a venue run by a US person can let verified investors, including retail investors, trade tokenized US stocks against stablecoins, other crypto assets or tokenized money market funds. The SEC lists the benefits itself: "investor self-custody, around-the-clock trading, fractional ownership of shares, and near instantaneous settlement." Even though Commissioner Peirce was clear that "this order is not about decentralized finance." Robinhood stock (HOOD) rose 3% and Coinbase stock (COIN) gained 4% on the day, while Uniswap (UNI) gained more than 30% over the following week, helped by a CME futures listing on September 22. Uniswap v4 hooks, which let a pool decide who can trade in it, are the obvious technology for a compliant venue.

The demand for onchain stocks is already visible offshore. Tokenized stock spot volume on decentralized exchanges went from $124 million a day in June to $715 million in September (see exhibit 1), with Robinhood Chain at $355 million a day, Binance's bStocks at $160 million and xStocks at $81 million. As we wrote last month, most of the Robinhood volume is memecoin trading that uses Stock Tokens as quote assets, but it shows how fast onchain stock trading can grow once the rails exist.

Exhibit 1: Tokenized stock trading volume of DEXs has grown about 6x since June

Source: Spartan Capital, Blockworks Research

The order also sets out which tokens can use those rails, and the ones that already qualify are growing faster than the rest of the market. They are the tokens built with full shareholder rights at Securitize, Superstate and Coinbase, which add up to about $450 million, up from $10 million in January, and they are the starting base of a US market. Across all issuers, tokenized stocks outstanding total $3.4 billion, up from $542 million at the start of the year, led by Ondo at $960 million, bStocks at $932 million and xStocks at $701 million (see exhibit 2), but these track a stock's price without passing on shareholder rights, so they cannot list on an exempt venue as they are. For issuers this is a product choice: rebuild the token with shareholder rights and a verified-only pool to use the exemption, or continue trading outside the exemption’s framework. Robinhood is already moving that way: Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, has said redemption and voting rights are planned for its Stock Tokens.

Exhibit 2: Tokenized stocks outstanding have grown about 6x this year, to $3.4 billion

Source: Spartan Capital, Blockworks Research

The September 25 staff guidance is the bigger deal for token projects and investors, since it covers any tokens whose network is already live, not only tokenized stocks. For those tokens it takes away most of the risk of being treated as a security under the Howey test (the legal test for an investment contract). Its three main highlights are: 1) maintaining, upgrading and growing a network are not the "essential managerial efforts" that make a token a security; 2) a buyback or burn is not a promise of returns, unless it is marketed as yield before the network works; and 3) a liquid staking token can be a digital commodity if the provider does not lend or pledge the deposits. On the first point, once a team has finished or permanently stopped the work it promised token buyers, it would file a public certification with the SEC, and from then on its token would no longer be treated as part of a securities offering.

The new SEC guidance marks a significant departure from the approach taken under former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who said in September 2022 that "the vast majority" of crypto tokens were securities. His SEC made that case through enforcement actions, one company at a time, rather than through rules: in 2023 Kraken paid $30 million and shut its US staking service, a few months later the SEC sued Coinbase and Binance, naming SOL, ADA and MATIC among the tokens it called securities, and in April 2024 Uniswap Labs received a Wells notice. The Coinbase and Binance cases and the Uniswap investigation were all dropped in 2025, after he left.

While the new rules are positive for the crypto industry, they are a set of staff views rather than Commission rules, so a future chair could withdraw it, which is why Regulation Crypto Assets matters: it would write a similar test into a Commission rule. What matters from here is which of the SEC's open proposals become final rules, since Chairman Atkins called the order itself "a bridge toward durable rulemaking." The SEC is working on a number of other proposals which will be unveiled in the coming months. These relate to token sales to US buyers (including retail), self-custody rules etc. With Congress stalled, these proposals are where US crypto rules will come from, and all of them point the same way: clear written rules in place of the lawsuits of the past few years.