SEC Exemption Lifts Arbitrum, Uniswap, and NEAR to New Heights
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has granted a temporary exemption for tokenized stocks to trade through permissioned automated market makers, sparking significant gains in several DeFi tokens. The five biggest gainers in the market today are decentralized exchange and Layer-2 tokens, with Arbitrum (ARB) leading at $0.2145, up 30.26%, followed by Uniswap (UNI) at $8.73 and NEAR Protocol (NEAR) at $3.47.
The exemption allows for tokenized US stocks to trade through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools without registering as a national securities exchange, and it requires smart contracts involved to be auditable and deployed on public, permissionless chains. This favors the public DeFi venues already running this infrastructure.
Uniswap is the clearest beneficiary of the exemption, having already built the venue that the SEC's language points to. Its Permissioned Pools framework lets regulated assets tap AMM liquidity while the issuer enforces eligibility on every trade.