Five-Year SEC Relief Sets Terms for Tokenized Stock AMMs

The latest Ripple news isn’t about Ripple at all, at least not directly. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a temporary, conditional exemption, granting qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues relief from the statutory definition of “exchange”. Why? So they can trade tokenized National Market System (NMS) stocks through permissioned automated market makers (AMM) and liquidity pools. A companion exemption covers certain liquidity providers supplying tokenized stock to those pools, temporarily relieving them from the “dealer” classification under the Exchange Act. The order does not name XRP, Ripple, or the XRP Ledger (XRPL). It is a technology-neutral framework built for any qualifying venue, not an approval of a specific network. This is not simply a crypto-market announcement. It is a regulatory acknowledgment that AMM liquidity pools can function as a legitimate component of a controlled, on-chain securities-trading structure, provided the venue operates within a permissioned environment. That distinction matters for XRPL, which has run a native AMM integrated into its permissioned decentralized-exchange infrastructure since early 2024, well ahead of this ord...