The Securities and Exchange Commission has spent two decades policing where stocks can trade and who can trade them. Now it's about to hand a piece of that authority to crypto platforms, while letting third parties issue tokenized versions of public companies' shares without asking those companies first.
Apple doesn't have to say yes, and neither does Microsoft. That's the part Wall Street is going to fight over.
The SEC is preparing what it calls an "innovation exemption," a time-limited carve-out from the normal securities rules that could be unveiled within days, according to a Bloomberg report.
The rule would let digital tokens linked to public-company shares trade on decentralized crypto platforms, with venues like Coinbase able to host U.S. equity trading during the experimental period without registering as a full broker-dealer.
The tokens would mirror the price of the underlying stock. They wouldn't come with shareholder rights like dividends or voting unless the platform chooses to offer them.
The SEC is reportedly weighing restrictions on platforms that strip those rights out, plus exposure limits and disclosure requirements tied to the program's temporary nature.
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Atkins took over the SEC under the Trump administration with a clear pro-crypto mandate, and his agency launched "Project Crypto" in summer 2025 to position the U.S. as the global leader in blockchain finance.
The innovation exemption has been part of that agenda from the start, with industry players submitting comments through the SEC and CFTC's joint crypto roundtable that began in September 2025.
The agency has already approved Nasdaq's tokenized equity rules in March and a similar set from the New York Stock Exchange in April. Both approvals kept trading inside traditional market structures, while this new exemption would push it outside them.
Project Crypto itself was the direct result of an executive order from earlier in 2025 aimed at making the U.S. the global hub for digital assets.
The SEC has been clear that tokenized stocks are still securities, with the exemption framed as experimental relief and not a reclassification.
Analysts say the broader market for tokenized real-world assets, which covers stocks, bonds and funds, could grow to anywhere from $2 trillion to $10 trillion by 2030.
The U.S. stock market today is roughly $126 trillion, so there's plenty of room to grow into.
Several crypto firms have already offered blockchain-based equity products outside the U.S., where regulators have been more open to the idea.
The companies whose stocks get tokenized without their consent are going to push back hard, which is the next chapter of this story.
If you want to know which way the rule actually lands and what it means for your investments, Market Briefs covers every major SEC move in plain English, with a free 45-minute investing course thrown in for new readers.
