SEC Clears Path for Onchain Stock Trading as MoonPay Partners With WisdomTree

The tokenization of traditional American finance took two significant steps forward this week, with regulators and private companies moving almost in lockstep to bring stocks and investment funds onto public blockchains.

SEC Grants Relief for Onchain Stock Trading

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued an order granting temporary, conditional exemptive relief to a category of platforms it calls Tokenized Securities Venues. The relief exempts these venues from the traditional legal definition of an "exchange," allowing them to trade tokenized versions of NMS (National Market System) stocks through permissioned automated market makers and onchain liquidity pools. In practice, this gives qualifying platforms a regulatory green light to run real, exchange-listed U.S. equities on blockchain rails, rather than through conventional order-book trading systems. The move follows recent signals from SEC leadership about pushing toward round-the-clock equity trading and using tokenization to improve settlement efficiency, and it lands alongside separate action from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which cleared software developers to build tools connecting users to registered futures firms and exchanges without registering as brokers themselves — a change that also touches crypto derivatives markets.

MoonPay and WisdomTree Partner on Tokenized Funds

On the private-sector side, crypto payments infrastructure provider MoonPay announced a strategic partnership with asset manager WisdomTree to bring tokenized mutual funds to U.S. investors. Built on MoonPay's institutional and trading infrastructure, the collaboration is set to let investors purchase WisdomTree's government money market fund, ticker WTGXX, using stablecoins later this year. The partnership effectively creates a direct stablecoin-to-fund purchase pathway, removing several of the frictions that have historically kept traditional asset managers and crypto-native payment rails separate.

Why It Matters

Taken together, these developments point to the same underlying trend: regulators are giving cautious but real approval to onchain infrastructure for equities and funds, while established financial firms are racing to build the retail-facing products that let ordinary investors access it. The SEC's exemptive order lowers the compliance barrier for trading venues experimenting with tokenized stocks, while the MoonPay-WisdomTree tie-up shows how quickly that infrastructure can be turned into a consumer product — in this case, a stablecoin-funded money market investment. Both moves also arrive as the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to set clearer digital-asset market structure rules, remains stalled in Congress, with a bipartisan group of senators recently signaling renewed willingness to negotiate a path forward.