Today the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption letting tokenized NMS stock trade onchain in the US: temporary relief from the exchange and dealer definitions, plus a request for comment. Effectively a sandbox, and a well-designed one. With important conditions:
🟩 A qualifying venue must halt a token concurrently with any halt in the underlying stock on its primary listing exchange.
🟩 Contracts must be public, auditable, and deployed on permissionless ledgers.
🟩 Venues must verify tokens carry the same rights and privileges as the share. Synthetics don't qualify.
🟩 Venues must publish prices, trade sizes, timestamps, pool addresses and daily volumes.
That reads like a spec for session-aware, transparent market structure. It's the spec we've been engineering to for tokenized equities on
@aave, built with
@chainlink, whose feeds already tell a protocol not just the price but the market state it was formed in.
For onchain credit, this builds the missing layer. SEC-permissioned venues making markets in full-rights tokenized blue chips means growing onchain depth to price against and exit into. Those are the two things a lending market needs from its venue layer.
Regulation and risk architecture are converging on the same design. Tokenized equities are getting real market structure. Aave is where it becomes a credit market.