SEC Prepares 'Innovation Exemption' for Tokenized Stocks as Crypto Market Nears Regulation Framework

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

Crypto majors mostly red, HYPE leads; BTC at $63.4k

Bitcoin spot trading volume falls to 7-year low

Goldman Sachs buys a BTC income ETF with $2.25B NEOS deal

Solana came close to going down after routing bug

Hyperliquid adds new function to handle tokenized stock functions like splits, dividends

🏛️ The SEC Moves to Bless the Onchain Stock Market Without Congress

The SEC is preparing to do on its own what Congress couldn’t.

Per Bloomberg, the SEC will roll out two crypto initiatives in the coming days while the CLARITY Act sits stalled until at least September. First, a Friday open meeting to propose “Regulation Crypto,” a framework letting projects raise capital through token sales without full securities registration. Second, and bigger for onchain markets, an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, with details possibly dropping Friday.

The exemption would let tokenized versions of stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia trade on blockchains around the clock, in fractional sizes, with near-instant settlement. The tokens typically track a stock’s economic exposure but carry no voting or dividend rights (though some protocols are working on solving the voting and dividend rights), which is what justifies the lighter regulatory treatment. It’s the core of Chair Paul Atkins’ “Project Crypto” agenda.

This lands squarely on the year’s biggest onchain growth story. Tokenized stocks have been the engine behind Robinhood Chain, whose RWA volume jumped fivefold this summer, and a major push across Solana and Base. The NYSE is building its own onchain settlement platform, BlackRock launched tokenized funds on Solana and Ethereum, and Circle’s Arc lined up BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard as validators. All of it has run in a regulatory gray zone, much of it routed to non-US users. A formal SEC exemption would hand that entire movement the legal clarity it’s been missing, potentially opening US retail access to the products these chains were built for.

If this comes through as expected, it could be one of the more bullish crypto news events in years. The RWA meta gets a full green light, and all the tokenized asset growth targets get amplified. Let’s hope this one is not a letdown…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are mostly red with HYPE leading; BTC -1% at $63.4k; ETH -1% at $1,880; SOL -1% at $75.60; HYPE +4% at $57.30

Top alt movers include OKB (+7%), MNT (+6%) and Virtual (+5%)

Oil -2% at $81; Gold -0.5% at $4,450

Stock futures are slightly green; DOW even, Nasdaq +0.5%

Bitcoin spot volume fell to its lowest since 2019, as the market sits between key cost-basis levels with seller exhaustion building but spot demand still weak

A routing bug took Solana 86% of the way to losing finality, after one hosting provider's misconfigured route knocked 28.83% of staked SOL offline, leaving the chain 4.51 points from the 33.34% freeze threshold

Goldman Sachs closed a $2.25 billion NEOS deal, acquiring the covered-call fund BTCI and NEOS’s roughly $30 billion in options-based products

Bitwise cut 14% of staff as the crypto slump reached ETF issuers, trimming to about 155 from 180

After Coldcard was hacked, $15 billion in Bitcoin moved to safety, as 233,000 BTC left long-term-holder wallets in the days around the breach

An XRP Ledger bridge was drained after its software treated fake deposits as real, with an attacker minting unbacked balances and pulling nearly 200,000 XRP (~$202,000) from the Tx bridge through a flaw that passed multiple audits

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

The Bitcoin ETFs saw $61M in net outflows on Wednesday; the ETH ETFs saw $7.4M in inflows

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mostly red; DOGE -3%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -1%, TRUMP -6%, BONK +2%

Robinhood chain was led by Pack (+90%), Yolo (+60%) and Frong (+30%); Stonkbrokers sees biggest selloff to date (-27%)

Solana leaders included Ava (+40%), momota (+180%) and XST (+33%)

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Hyperliquid is adding a "scaleWei" function that could let tokenized stocks handle corporate actions onchain, stock splits, dividends, and spin-offs, by atomically redistributing token balances

Hyperliquid also opened its low-latency data nodes for under $1,000 a month, dropping a prior 10,000-HYPE staking requirement to widen access to its real-time trading data