Overview
- The SEC on Sept. 17 granted a five‑year, conditional exemption letting qualifying permissioned venues list and trade tokenized U.S. listed stocks under limits on symbols and volume and requirements that tokens give the same rights as the underlying shares.
- The CFTC on Sept. 24 issued staff guidance saying registered derivatives firms may invest customer funds in tokenized versions of permitted assets only when the tokens confer legal and economic rights that are the same or functionally equivalent to the traditional asset.
- CFTC staff said blockchain or distributed‑ledger records can meet Regulation 1.31 recordkeeping duties if records remain reliable, accessible and producible and if public networks are backed by systems that preserve and produce records during outages.
- CFTC Chair Michael Selig warned regulators to prepare for what he called 'mass tokenization,' saying tokenization could change settlement speed, collateral flows and the potential for round‑the‑clock markets and prompting the agency to send a crypto market framework to OIRA.
- The agencies are running time‑limited tests and asking for data and feedback to shape formal rules, a move that could speed settlement and alter custody and surveillance roles for firms while leaving the actions open to legal and state‑level challenge.