The US Securities and Exchange Commission is in the final stages of an "innovation exemption" that would permit crypto-native platforms to offer blockchain-based trading of publicly listed US stocks without needing full broker-dealer registration. On the same day, Coinbase Global filed a formal no-action request with the SEC seeking permission to offer tokenised equities to its customers, with Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal leading the regulatory push. The move accelerates a structural shift that has been building since January 2026, when the SEC formally defined tokenised securities and confirmed that tokenisation does not alter a security's legal status and does not generally impact its capital treatment.

What the Framework Actually Covers

A tokenised stock is a blockchain-based record of ownership in an underlying equity. The SEC draws a hard line between these instruments and synthetic products that merely track a stock's price without conveying real ownership. Commissioner Hester Peirce has publicly underscored that the framework applies only to digital representations of actual securities. The SEC's January 28 staff statement put it plainly: "Tokenized securities are still securities." The technologies used to issue or trade them do not change their legal status, and do not generally impact their capital treatment.

The SEC's framework also establishes a two-category taxonomy for tokenised securities. Issuer-sponsored instruments are created directly by the company whose shares are being tokenised. Third-party tokenised instruments are created by external parties and are subject to heightened regulatory scrutiny. This distinction shapes how platforms and investors must assess legal and operational risk, and it determines where the experimental framework places its greatest compliance demands.

The NYSE already received SEC approval in April 2026 for a rule change (SR-NYSE-2026-17) that lets tokenised shares trade on the same order book as conventional shares, sharing the same CUSIP identifier, with T+1 settlement processed through the Depository Trust Company. The rule change limits initial launch assets to Russell 1000 constituents and major index ETFs, a constraint that materially narrows the range of stocks accessible to retail investors at the outset. A fallback provision automatically reverts trades to conventional settlement if wallet or blockchain issues arise; the mechanism draws on DTC's tokenisation pilot, which received SEC staff no-action relief in December 2025. Nasdaq secured a separate SEC approval in March 2026 for a blockchain-based share issuance framework. NYSE also announced a partnership with Securitize for a dedicated 24/7 tokenised securities venue and a partnership with OKX for tokenised product expansion. The DTCC is scheduled to launch limited tokenised asset settlement infrastructure in July 2026, with a broader rollout in October.

The exemption being finalised is time-limited. Platforms operating under it are expected to migrate toward full compliance eventually. Critics, including Daniel Labovitz, CEO of the Green Impact Exchange, have raised substantive structural concerns. In his words: "The tokens may not represent actual ownership of the company... another problem is fragmentation: when the same security trades in different markets, the price of the assets can diverge." Regulatory analysts have separately warned that the framework may create a two-tier market with differing investor protections for tokenised versus conventional equity holders, a concern distinct from Labovitz's pricing point.

On-Chain Numbers Show Rapid Growth

The broader market for tokenised real-world assets reached approximately $23.6 billion in 2026, up 66% year to date according to DeFiLlama data. Tokenised stocks specifically have grown to roughly $1.48 billion in market cap, more than doubling over six months, with around 352,000 active wallets holding these instruments, up 188% in the same period. Three out of every four new RWA wallets opened in 2026 belong to tokenised stock holders, according to CEX.IO's Q2 tracking data. A separate measure, drawn from a different data source tracking a broader scope of tokenised assets, puts the overall three-year expansion of the tokenised RWA market at from $1 billion to $28 billion; the two figures are not directly comparable, as they reflect different asset categories and methodologies.

To contextualise the scale of potential opportunity: the US equity market is valued at approximately $126 trillion, and projections for the total tokenised asset market by 2030 range from $2 trillion to $10 trillion. Even at the lower end of those projections, current figures represent an early-stage fraction of a potentially significant structural shift.

As of Q1 2026, Bitget controlled approximately 89% of tokenised stock trading volume globally, according to a report published jointly by Bitget and Block Scholes in April 2026. Because this figure originates from Bitget's own research, it should be read with appropriate caution and treated as an indicator of approximate scale rather than an independently verified measure. Southeast Asia leads all regions, accounting for 81.9% of RWA trade volume on the Bitget platform in Q1 2026. Traders in the region have used tokenised tech stocks to react to market events outside conventional exchange hours, including the volatility spike in March 2026.

Kraken launched its xStocks tokenised stock products in May 2025, making it an early mover in this space, though no US-based offering from Kraken currently exists. Robinhood and Charles Schwab are among the platforms cited as potential future competitors as the regulatory environment clarifies.

Emerging Markets: South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

South Asian traders made up 20.5% of active tokenised asset participants globally in Q1 2026, the second-largest regional cohort, behind only Southeast Asia at 26.2%. For retail investors in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, the core appeal is straightforward: US markets are closed during their daytime hours, and traditional foreign brokerage access involves time-zone friction, capital requirements, and slow settlement. Tokenised stocks reduce or eliminate these barriers, enabling fractional ownership at potentially sub-dollar increments around the clock. Local regulatory clarity, however, remains absent. India's securities regulator SEBI has not issued guidance on whether Indian residents can legally hold US-issued tokenised stocks.

Africa and the Middle East together account for 18.4% of active traders globally, a notable figure given infrastructure constraints across much of the continent. The structural opportunity goes beyond retail equity access. Vera Songwe, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has argued that tokenisation could address Africa's $331 billion SME financing gap by allowing firms to tokenise government invoice receivables, build verifiable credit histories on-chain, and raise capital through fractional equity offerings. The scope of this challenge is macroeconomic in nature: in Nigeria, small and medium enterprises account for 60 to 70% of employment and approximately 50% of GDP. Sub-Saharan Africa loses roughly one percentage point of GDP growth annually to government payment arrears owed to small businesses, a problem tokenised invoice financing is positioned to target directly. Brookings recommends that African securities commissions work with central banks and international organisations including the Bank for International Settlements and Goldman Sachs to build regulatory sandboxes before product launches, pointing to Singapore's Canton Network pilot as a workable model. The risks without that groundwork are real: data quality gaps, weak AML infrastructure, and limited governance frameworks could expose retail users to fraud and price manipulation, particularly with third-party tokenised instruments, which face heightened scrutiny compared to issuer-sponsored products under the SEC's two-category taxonomy.

What Comes Next

The SEC's draft strategic plan for fiscal years 2026 to 2030, published June 2, lists digital assets and distributed ledger technology as the agency's first regulatory priority, appearing under Goal 1 of the plan. Chair Paul Atkins, appointed under the Trump administration, has consistently pushed for rules-based clarity over enforcement actions. This posture reflects a broader shift in how the agency has approached digital assets: the SEC launched "Project Crypto" in August 2025, a joint SEC-CFTC roundtable on regulatory clarity followed in September 2025, and the agency dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase in 2025. That sequence of enforcement retreat and policy development is the context in which Coinbase is now seeking proactive no-action relief rather than responding to an active complaint.

If the experimental period proceeds as intended, platforms operating under the exemption are expected to migrate toward a more permanent compliance framework, though the agency has not committed to a specific rulemaking timeline. With DTCC infrastructure rolling out this autumn and major platforms seeking no-action relief and regulatory approvals, the questions that will define the next phase are which platforms secure the necessary regulatory clearance to offer tokenised equities and which retail markets will have the local regulatory cover to participate.