The Hyperliquid Policy Center and Douro Labs, a core contributor to the Pyth Network, jointly submitted a comment letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week arguing that brokers trading tokenized stocks onchain should be able to measure trade quality against independent, blockchain-native price feeds rather than being tied exclusively to the official national benchmark. The filing, signed by Douro Labs general counsel Brandon H. Ferrick and Hyperliquid Policy Center senior counsel Brad Bourque, lands in the middle of an SEC rulemaking process that could reshape how tokenized equities trade in the U.S.
That process traces back to June 11, 2026, when the SEC proposed rescinding two provisions of Regulation NMS: Rule 611, the so-called trade-through rule requiring orders to route to the best available price across exchanges, and Rule 610(e), which prohibits locked or crossed quotations. Both rules were written for a market structure built around traditional exchanges trading on a next-day settlement cycle, an assumption that doesn't hold for blockchain-based trading that settles instantly on a shared ledger.
Why the Distinction Matters
Douro Labs and the Hyperliquid Policy Center support scrapping both rules outright, and go further by arguing that onchain trades already fall outside Rule 611's scope under an existing exception for transactions not executed on “regular way” terms, since they clear instantly rather than through the standard settlement window. Their written submission to the SEC's Crypto Task Force frames the price-feed question as a practical follow-on: if tokenized equities are going to trade under a modernized rulebook, brokers need a recognized way to prove they got their customers a fair price, and that benchmark should be able to come from onchain oracle networks like Pyth rather than only from legacy consolidated tape providers.
Part of a Bigger Market-Structure Fight
The petition adds a DeFi-specific voice to a rulemaking fight that has drawn plenty of attention from crypto-adjacent platforms this year, as onchain trading venues position themselves for a regulatory framework that could let tokenized stocks trade alongside crypto assets on the same infrastructure. It's the kind of granular market-structure lobbying that rarely makes headlines on its own but tends to matter enormously for how a rule actually gets written, especially as the White House, SEC and other agencies work through a packed crypto policy calendar this year. Separately, the same underlying debate over how U.S. regulators treat blockchain-based finance has played out through enforcement actions as much as rulemaking, including Chainalysis's lawsuit against the U.S. government over a contested $94.6 million blockchain-analytics deal.
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