Orca’s legal chief says SEC exemption lets DeFi test its efficiency claims

DeFi has spent years claiming it can move markets faster and cheaper than Wall Street. Now it gets a chance to prove it under regulatory supervision. Speaking at Korea Blockchain Week 2026, Orca Chief Legal Officer Christopher Montagano said the SEC’s new innovation exemption allows decentralized finance to test whether blockchain rails are actually more efficient than traditional ones. What the SEC exemption actually allows The SEC issued its Innovation Exemption on September 17, 2026. It grants five years of conditional relief, running until September 17, 2031. Under the framework, Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs) and certain liquidity providers can run permissioned trading of tokenized US-listed National Market System (NMS) stocks. The exemption was built with automated market makers (AMMs) and liquidity pools on public blockchains in mind. On a traditional exchange, buyers and sellers are matched through an order book, with registered dealers and exchanges standing in the middle. An AMM swaps that structure for a pool of assets and a pricing formula, so trades execute against the pool rather than against a specific counterparty. The exemption lets these pools operate without ...