Solana's policy arm reads an SEC order as opening tokenised stocks
Serguey Asael Shinder1 min readThe Solana Policy Institute has published an account of an SEC order issued on 23 September 2026 that, by its description, lets tokenised stocks trade in the United States on public, permissionless blockchains for five years without the venue registering as a stock exchange, and exempts liquidity providers quoting into those pools from dealer registration. The tokens must be the real shares. The piece is at https://solana.com/news/stocks-sec-innovation-exemption.
What it means
Read who wrote it before reading what it says. The author is Miller Whitehouse-Levine, founder and chief executive of the Solana Policy Institute, a non-profit that advocates for policies favourable to networks like Solana. The facts it reports are checkable against the order itself; the framing is advocacy, and the two should not be merged.
Taking the description at face value, the interesting term is the five years. A time-limited exemption is not a rule - it is an experiment with a reporting date. It gives builders a window long enough to construct something and short enough that the regulator keeps the option of walking back, which is a different proposition from a permanent permission and should be financed differently.
The condition that the tokens be the real shares is the load-bearing one. It rules out synthetic exposure dressed as equity, and it puts the hard part back where it belongs: custody, corporate actions, and who is on the register when a vote is called.
⚠️ We have not opened the order. What is reported here is a description of it by an interested party, and anyone acting on it should read the SEC's own text - the terms of an exemption live in its conditions, which a summary is exactly the wrong place to learn.