SEC Unlocks Tokenized Stocks
Updated: Oct 7
The SEC's tokenization order reads like a green light. The 0.25% volume cap says otherwise.
FatTail Weekly
Week of September 16 to 22, 2026 · Published Tuesday, September 22, 2026
A concise briefing on the technologies, companies and ideas changing how people invest, trade and manage wealth.
The Week's Big Picture
A tokenized Apple share is now allowed to trade on a US blockchain venue, as long as it stays under 0.25% of Apple's daily volume. The SEC opened that door on September 17, the same day its staff let eToro and Alpaca run brokerage accounts that keep customer cash at a bank, and by the next day Kalshi, Coinbase and Kraken's parent had filed to sell perpetual futures on US stocks.
On the advice side, Bill Harris, who built Personal Capital to $23 billion in assets, launched an AI adviser that is free until 2028 and keeps the math out of the chatbot. His timing was good: the same day, a UK study found popular chatbots got money questions wrong 57% of the time.
Top Developments
SEC Opens a Five-Year Lane for Tokenized US Stocks on Blockchain Venues
Long story short: The SEC issued a conditional "innovation exemption" on September 17 that lets qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues trade tokenized NMS stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without registering as exchanges. The relief runs five years, to September 17, 2031, and also covers certain liquidity providers.
The juicy bits:
Tier 1 large caps: 75 symbols and 0.25% of the stock's prior-month average daily share volume.
All other NMS stocks: 250 symbols and 2.5%; repeated breaches trigger a three-month trading pause.
Third-party tokens can't trade until 30 calendar days after the issuer gets notice and a chance to object.
SEC Crypto Task Force counsel Taylor Lindman expects the first venues to file operating notices next quarter.
SIFMA warned of lightly regulated parallel markets and pushed for formal notice-and-comment rulemaking instead.
The FatTail take: The issuer veto is the most important line in this order. Every general counsel at a large-cap company now has a free, safe way to say no to a crypto venue, and most of them will use it. Add a 0.25% volume cap and this is a five-year pilot built to stay small, so SIFMA's members should stop complaining: a pilot this small costs them nothing.
Source: SEC press release 2026-90 · SEC exemptive order · SIFMA statement · Crypto Times (Lindman timing)
Kalshi, Coinbase and Kraken's Parent Race to Offer Perpetual Futures on US Stocks
Long story short: Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Bitnomial, the CFTC-regulated exchange owned by Kraken parent Payward, filed on September 18 to list perpetual futures on individual US stocks and ETFs, with Payward saying its rules and product terms went to both the CFTC and SEC. Two days earlier Payward also announced plans to offer US clients perpetuals on Hyperliquid's blockchain through Bitnomial; none of these products has been approved.
The juicy bits:
Kalshi filed 58 equity-linked contracts; Coinbase proposed more than 50 stocks and ETFs, per Finance Magnates.
Payward plans 10 stocks and 24/5 trading; Finance Magnates names Apple, Nvidia and Tesla among them.
Kalshi proposes a November 2 effective date and 15.5% minimum customer margin, per crypto.news.
Hyperliquid plan: Bitnomial lists and clears, NinjaTrader Clearing carries accounts, Hyperliquid's onchain order book matches trades.
CME sued the CFTC on June 18 over its approval of Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual, per crypto.news.
The FatTail take: Stock perpetuals are a leverage product for retail speculators, and nobody filing for them should pretend otherwise. CME is the incumbent that stands to lose if these get approved, and it knows it: it is already suing the CFTC over Kalshi's bitcoin version. Of the three plans, Payward's Hyperliquid route deserves the hardest look from regulators, because it sends US customer orders to a blockchain venue for matching.
Source: Finance Magnates · crypto.news (Kalshi filing terms) · Payward press release (Hyperliquid) · Crypto Briefing (Payward stock perpetuals)
SEC Staff Give eToro and Alpaca No-Action Relief for Accounts That Keep Customer Cash Outside the Broker
Long story short: The SEC's Division of Trading and Markets issued no-action letters on September 17 to eToro USA Securities and Alpaca Securities for "zero cash balance" brokerage accounts. Customer cash stays in an external bank or licensed money-transmitter account, moves to the broker to pay for a purchase and goes back out after a sale.
The juicy bits:
eToro, an introducing broker, needs minimum net capital of $5,000 under the relief.
Alpaca, a carrying and clearing firm, needs $250,000 or 2% of aggregate debit items, whichever is greater.
Customers must be told external-account cash falls outside the broker's SIPC coverage.
This is a staff position, not a Commission rule.
Counsel Lowenstein Sandler says purchases can be funded from bank accounts, crypto holdings or remittance accounts.
The FatTail take: This is the most underrated item in the issue. It hands every remittance service and crypto wallet with a partner broker a template for adding a Buy button without asking customers to move cash, and that should worry every broker whose main advantage is an easy signup. The weak point is SIPC: cash at a money transmitter sits outside the broker's coverage, and when one fails with trade money in transit, the SEC will regret granting this by staff letter.
Bill Harris Launches Evergreen.ai, a Free AI Financial Adviser Run Through an RIA
Long story short: Bill Harris, the former PayPal and Intuit CEO who founded Personal Capital, launched Evergreen.ai on September 21, an AI app that gives personalized advice on retirement, taxes, equity compensation and home buying. It is operated by Evergreen Wealth Advisors, an SEC-registered investment adviser, and the AI planning tool is free through January 1, 2028 for anyone who registers during the public beta.
The juicy bits:
Human advice and investment management are sold separately, for a fee, through Evergreen Wealth Advisors.
Pairs a large language model with rules-based software that does the financial calculations.
Accounts link through Plaid; company says data is never sold or used to train public AI models.
Evergreen Wealth held about $112 million in total assets at the end of 2025, per WealthManagement.com.
Harris cites a 2024 survey finding 73% of American adults don't use a financial advisor.
The FatTail take: Evergreen.ai is a lead-generation app for a $112 million RIA, and users should judge it that way. Keeping the math out of the chatbot is the right design, and any robo shipping a chat assistant that does its own arithmetic should be embarrassed. What matters now is whether free planning converts to paid human advice at a rate that covers the cost, and Harris has until January 2028 to show it does.
Milemarker Opens Advisory Firms' Data to Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini Through One MCP Server
Long story short: Milemarker launched Firm MCP on September 22, a Model Context Protocol server that lets an advisory firm point Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini or any MCP-compatible AI tool at the data in its custodians, CRM and planning systems.
The juicy bits:
Connects to more than 140 custodians, CRMs, portfolio systems and planning tools.
Ships with over 300 features covering reporting, governance, workflows and app building.
Client data stays inside the firm's Milemarker Snowflake environment.
Pricing depends on data volume; CEO Jud Mackrill declined to give figures.
Milemarker launched a general MCP server in May 2026; Firm MCP has no waitlist.
The FatTail take: Within a year every serious advisor-tech vendor will have an MCP server, so what Milemarker is really selling is its 140-plus integrations, and those are worth paying for. Refusing to publish a price tells smaller RIAs the product isn't meant for them. If the big custodians and CRM vendors ship their own MCP servers for free, Milemarker's advantage shrinks fast.
Source: WealthManagement.com
Also Worth Knowing
Deutsche Bank's private bank said on September 22 it is using an agentic AI system to handle source-of-wealth checks in client onboarding, already live in its Singapore and Hong Kong booking centers with human oversight kept in place, and plans to roll it out to more wealth centers. Private Banking Magazin · Finextra
WisdomTree and MoonPay said on September 17 they are building access for eligible US investors to WTGXX, WisdomTree's tokenized Treasury money market fund, through MoonPay, which says it reaches more than 35 million accounts, with MoonPay also planning to use the fund in its stablecoin reserves. crypto.news
The European Central Bank switched on Pontes on September 21, letting regulated banks and market infrastructures settle trades in tokenized bonds, funds and other assets in central bank money by linking blockchain platforms to its TARGET payment system. CoinDesk
At the SEC's September 17 roundtable on 24-hour trading, Commissioner Hester Peirce said extended operating hours for the securities information processors are scheduled to launch on December 6, 2026. SEC: Peirce remarks
The SEC proposed on September 16 to rescind Rule 14a-8, the shareholder-proposal rule, and to cut the minimum broker search period for identifying a company's beneficial owners from 20 business days to five, alongside eliminating the annual report delivery requirement. SEC press release 2026-89
Kalshi asked the CFTC to let its clearinghouse charge risk-based margin instead of full collateral on economic, financial and political event contracts for futures commission merchants and eligible self-clearing members, with sports contracts still fully collateralized. Finance Magnates
Invesco launched its Personalised Investor Engine on September 22 with UK digital bank Zopa, using behavioral profiling built with Oxford Risk to nudge some of Zopa's 1.5 million mass-affluent savers into investing. FinTech Global
UK advice-tech firm Saturn tested 18 AI models, including free and paid versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot, on 121 money questions and found current models failed 57% of the time on average, with the best performer still wrong in almost four of ten cases. InvestmentNews
What We're Watching
Kalshi's stock perpetuals carry a proposed November 2 effective date, so the CFTC's 45-day review is now the clock to watch, and CME's lawsuit over Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual shows how hard the incumbent exchange is prepared to push back. The first read on retail appetite comes sooner. Robinhood's HOOD Summit in Houston on September 29 and 30 opens with a keynote promising updates for active traders, and a tokenized-stock venue or a stock-perpetuals partner announced there would show which of this month's new openings a major retail broker actually plans to use.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the SEC's innovation exemption for tokenized stocks?
The SEC's innovation exemption, issued September 17, 2026, is five-year conditional relief that lets qualifying Tokenized Securities Venues trade tokenized NMS stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools without registering as exchanges. It runs to September 17, 2031. Under the order, Tier 1 large caps are limited to 75 symbols and 0.25% of prior-month average daily share volume, and a third party's token of a company's stock cannot trade until 30 calendar days after the issuer receives notice and a chance to object.
Can you trade perpetual futures on US stocks?
Not yet: Kalshi, Coinbase Derivatives and Kraken-owned Bitnomial filed on September 18, 2026 to list perpetual futures on US stocks and ETFs, and none has been approved. Kalshi filed 58 contracts, Coinbase proposed more than 50, and Payward plans to start with 10 stocks. Kalshi's filing proposes a November 2, 2026 effective date.
What is a zero cash balance brokerage account?
A zero cash balance brokerage account keeps customer cash in an external bank or licensed money-transmitter account, moving it to the broker only to pay for a purchase and sending sale proceeds back out. SEC staff issued no-action relief for the model to eToro USA Securities and Alpaca Securities in letters dated September 17, 2026. Cash held in the external account falls outside the broker-dealer's SIPC coverage; any other protection depends on where that account is held.
What is Evergreen.ai?
Evergreen.ai is an AI financial advice app launched on September 21, 2026 by Bill Harris, the former PayPal and Intuit CEO who founded Personal Capital. It gives personalized guidance on retirement, taxes, equity compensation and home buying, and is operated by Evergreen Wealth Advisors, an SEC-registered investment adviser. The AI planning tool is free through January 1, 2028 for users who register during the beta, while human advice and investment management cost extra.
What is Milemarker Firm MCP?
Milemarker Firm MCP is a Model Context Protocol server launched on September 22, 2026 that lets advisory firms connect AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Codex and Gemini to their own data. It links to more than 140 custodians, CRMs, portfolio and planning systems, and client data stays inside the firm's Milemarker Snowflake environment. Milemarker has not disclosed pricing.
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