PANews reported on June 12 that Alex Thorn, Head of Research at Galaxy Digital, stated on the X platform that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed repealing Rule 611 (Order Protection Rule) and Rule 610(e) (Lockdown/Cross-Market Restriction) of Reg NMS. Rule 611, which requires each exchange to prevent the execution of trades at prices inferior to the protected offers displayed on other exchanges, has been a core rule of the U.S. stock market structure since 2005.
Alex Thorn stated that Section 611 was one of the biggest obstacles to trading tokenized stocks in DeFi. Automated market makers (AVMs) could not comply with the rule, and any liquidity pool for tokenized stocks would continuously violate regulations, essentially constituting an illegal trading center. The repeal of Section 611 is replaced by the "best enforcement" principle, which applies at the broker level and is based on a rule-based framework rather than transaction-by-transaction review, thus ensuring compatibility with AFMs. Thorn explained that this is part of the SEC's "Crypto Project" initiative, first removing the most difficult market structure barriers and then addressing venue registration issues through "innovation exemptions."




