The innovation exemption has arrived. Today, the Commission issued an order containing time-limited exemptions designed to permit onchain trading of stocks listed on major U.S. exchanges. Adapting the Commission’s rules to new technologies is hard work, and I commend the Division of Trading and Markets, the Crypto Task Force, and other staff for their work on these exemptions. These exemptions enable market participants to experiment to be prepared for a future in which trading tokenized stocks onchain is commonplace. Taken together with the Division of Trading and Market’s April statement on interfaces used to prepare transactions in crypto asset securities,[1] today’s action is also a major step forward in allowing individuals greater personal autonomy to own and trade their own assets without the need for unnecessary intermediaries.

In issuing this order, the Commission is rejecting the approach that the mythological Procrustes would have taken. He was not asking the guests their sleep number; he claimed to have a bed that fit every traveler. In reality, he brute-forced each traveler to fit the one bed he had by stretching short travelers and cutting the legs off tall ones. Here, by contrast, the Commission is using its exemptive authority to tailor the bed to fit the sleeper. Carefully crafted conditions on that relief should ensure that nobody else’s sleep is disturbed.