PANews reported on March 15 that Hester M. Peirce, Commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stated that a study has been initiated on an "innovation exemption" scheme for tokenized securities, allowing limited trading and technology trials of certain tokenized securities. This exemption scheme will be more cautious than the "comprehensive exemption" recommended by the industry. She believes that it is necessary to explore whether to allow different types of securities tokenization models to be experimented with under the innovation exemption framework, and to consider whether issuers need to agree to third parties issuing tokenized versions of their shares, in order to promote technological innovation while avoiding regulatory arbitrage and maintaining core investor protection mechanisms.
Hester M. Peirce also emphasized that regulators should not over-intervene in private capital allocation. Currently, the SEC is assessing several key issues, including: whether the existing disclosure regime is sufficient to cover the ownership structure of tokenized securities, the disclosure obligations of brokers and clearing houses in the issuance of tokenized securities, the compatibility of atomic settlement with the existing T+1 settlement rule, and the applicability of regulatory authority under no-intermediary or new intermediary structures.