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SEC Grants Innovation Exemption For Tokenized Stocks
The SEC grants conditional five-year relief allowing tokenized stock trading in permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools.
It's Thursday, September 17, 2026.
The SEC grants a five-year Innovation Exemption for tokenized stocks. S&P Global enters an agreement to acquire smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin. EIP-8015 advances to CFI for the Hegotá upgrade. And the CFTC issues no-action relief for derivatives markets.
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SEC Grants Innovation Exemption
The SEC announced the Innovation Exemption, an order granting temporary, conditional exemptive relief to Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs) from the definition of "exchange" under the Exchange Act of 1934. The five-year order allows TSVs to facilitate secondary trading of tokenized National Market System (NMS) stocks using permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools.
SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins stated that the relief provides a structured path to resolve legal uncertainty while maintaining market integrity. Alongside the exchange relief, the order provides a conditional exemption from the Section 3(a)(5) "dealer" definition for liquidity providers supplying proprietary capital to the pools. To qualify for the relief, TSVs must comply with several operational and investor protection conditions.
SEC Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda characterized the exemption as a well-trod historical path toward data-driven policymaking. SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce noted that the order does not govern decentralized finance, explaining that automated, permissionless smart contracts mediating peer-to-peer trading do not present the foundational intermediary risks that securities regulations were designed to address.
CFTC Issues No-Action Relief
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Market Participants Division issued a broad no-action position protecting providers of passive software from registration requirements under the Commodity Exchange Act. The staff position confirms that division staff will not recommend enforcement action against non-custodial software developers or their personnel for failing to register as introducing brokers or associated persons.
To qualify for the safe harbor, software providers must remain strictly passive: they cannot take custody of user funds, exercise discretion over order routing, or generate automated trading signals or advice. The broad no-action stance provides regulatory clarity for decentralized frontends, interface developers, and automated routing tools interacting with US-regulated derivatives markets.
S&P Global To Acquire OpenZeppelin
Smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin is being acquired by S&P Global. OpenZeppelin's open-source smart contract libraries facilitate over $37 trillion in transferred value across major DeFi protocols, blockchains, stablecoins, and tokenized funds. S&P Global plans to integrate OpenZeppelin's smart contract security capabilities into its digital assets strategy, which focuses on providing transparent risk assessment, benchmarks, and data for onchain markets.
OpenZeppelin Contracts and related applications will remain free, open source, and publicly maintained on GitHub. Security audits, engineering engagements, and ecosystem programs will continue under the same team and brand, augmented by S&P Global's research capacity and institutional client network. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and the deal remains subject to closing conditions.
EIP-8015 Moves To CFI For Hegotá
Ethereum core developers moved EIP-8015 to Considered for Inclusion (CFI) for the Hegotá upgrade. The proposal removes deprecated deposits and eth1 data fields from the BeaconBlockBody and BeaconState data structures, officially retiring the legacy deposit voting machinery. Cleaning up the dormant fields eliminates transition-era technical debt, streamlines block validation routines, and simplifies client consensus specifications.
Meanwhile, seven proposals were formally Declined for Inclusion (DFI) for Hegotá, though post-quantum cryptography research will continue informally. So far, 21 of the 62 proposals proposed for Hegotá have been declined. Glamsterdam, Ethereum's next upgrade, is scheduled to activate on the Sepolia testnet on October 6th, with the subsequent activation on the Hoodi testnet tentatively targeted for October 27th.
Misc News
Ethlabs outlines the case for Quick Slots. ETH Online wrapped up, check out the finalists. Blockscout releases v11.3.1. Shutter Network releases a Concorde Shared Agent Launcher. Strato hosts a trading competition. Jacob Horne joins Polymarket.
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