The US SEC proposed to abolish Rule 611 of Reg NMS or clear obstacles for tokenized stocks

Alex Thorn, Head of Research at Galaxy Digital, posted on the X platform that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed to abolish Rule 611 of Reg NMS (Order Protection Rule) and Rule 610(e) (Locking/Crossing Market Restrictions). Rule 611 requires each trading center to prevent trades from being executed at prices inferior to protected quotes displayed by other exchanges, and it has been a core rule of the U.S. stock market structure since 2005. Alex Thorn stated that Rule 611 is one of the biggest obstacles to trading tokenized stocks in DeFi. Automated market makers cannot comply with this rule, and any liquidity pool for tokenized stocks would continuously violate the regulation, essentially constituting an illegal trading center.

After the abolition of Rule 611, it will be replaced by the "best execution" principle, which applies at the broker level and is based on a rules-based framework rather than a trade-by-trade review, thus being compatible with automated market makers. Alex Thorn mentioned that this is part of the SEC's execution of the "crypto project" plan, first abolishing the most challenging market structure barriers and then addressing venue registration issues through "innovation waivers."