After the CLARITY Act Stalled: SEC Tokenization Exemption, CFTC Proposal and Spot Gaps
Two U.S. regulators are continuing to build pieces of a digital-asset framework after the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate. But the most important pieces are at different legal stages: one has already taken effect as limited relief, another is a request for comment, and a comprehensive statutory framework for ordinary spot markets is still missing. The distinction was highlighted in new October 11 interviews with industry executives and legal scholars. Some expect agencies to enable products faster than Congress could. Others warn that executive-agency changes cannot create the durable boundaries a statute would have established.The SECs tokenized-stock exemption is real—and narrow On September 17 the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a temporary, conditional Innovation Exemption for limited trading in tokenized National Market System stocks on qualifying tokenized-securities venues. The published conditions include permissioned trading, transaction transparency, restrictions on symbols and volumes, protections around trading halts, records and systems controls. A venue still has to satisfy those conditions. The exemption does not mean any decentralized exchange can trade any security without other obligations, nor does it certify the economic value of a particular token. The SEC describes the mechanism as a controlled way to learn from live onchain
