On June 11 2026 the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rescinding Rule 611 of Regulation NMS, also known as the trade-through rule, which ensures that investors receive the best possible price regardless of which exchange executes their trade. The rule prevents trading venues from executing an order at a price that was worse than the best publicly displayed price on any other competing exchange.

Paul Atkins, chairman of the SEC said in a statement that although the  central aim of Rule 611 was to incentivize displayed liquidity, trading activity has increasingly occurred off-exchange over the last two decades. Atkins said: “I am concerned that what the Rule rather incentivized was a proliferation of new trading venues, which in turn fragmented liquidity and created an increasingly complex, costly, and opaque marketplace for order execution.”

Joe Saluzzi, partner and co-founder of broker Themis Trading, said on X that the SEC has “sold out the retail investor so they could move forward with their tokenized Field of Dreams.”

This is not correct. If these disastrous rules are repealed, FINRA 5310 will become load bearing and the duty to ensure users get best execution will fall to the brokers. It is extremely easy to audit this because exeuction is very easy to measure.

This setup is how securities… https://t.co/PXnyEMxXjj

— Max Resnick (@MaxResnick) June 12, 2026

Saluzzi suggested that the SEC the could have proposed modifications including introducing market share thresholds for protected quotes, adjusting SIP revenue formula to stop rewarding exchanges for fleeting quotes and adding depth of book protection. (The SIP, or consolidated tape, publishes the prevailing National Best Bid Offer (NBBO) for U.S equities. The NBBO is a composite of the highest bid and lowest offer across all U.S. equity exchanges in real time.)

Rather than eliminating Rule 611, modifications could have been suggested. I discussed this with @RepStephenLynch at last month's House Financial Services Committee meetinghttps://t.co/AOlyIP1k4Z

— Joe Saluzzi (@JoeSaluzzi) June 11, 2026

@TradingDutchman, who describes himself as an “HFT market maker turned HF market taker”, said:

Part of this “getting ready for tokenised securities “ is abolishing the trade through rule. Crypto exchanges tech is extremely crappy, and liquidity in these TS is even more crap. Part of the CLARITY act is a rule that “if you want to trade TS, you need to be regulated as an… https://t.co/VBSbxUtW06 pic.twitter.com/lj0LapgfeL

— The trading Dutchman (@TradingDutchman) June 6, 2026

He said: “Part of the CLARITY act is a rule that “if you want to trade TS, you need to be regulated as an exchange and follow all the existing securities regulations, like reg NMS, reg T, reg SHO, etc

There is no way Coinbase , Binance, etc will be able to do that and compete with Nasdaq / Arca, BATS et all, and they would have to route all that flow away to the incumbents. To prevent that and keep the flow to themselves, it looks like they convinced the regulators to give up the price protection rules for investors.

I am worried there will be a lot of abuse of this exemption. (PFOF anybody?) Let’s wait and find out more detail of what exactly is the plan here.”

Alex Thorn, head of  research at digital asset fund manager, agreed the trade-through rule is “one of the biggest structural barriers to tokenized US equities trading in DeFi [decentralized finance] today” as AMMs are not designed to comply with the rule. An (automated market makers (AMM) uses mathematical formulas and smart contracts to set prices and execute trades automatically rather than matching buyers and sellers in a traditional order book.

the Commission voted to propose rescinding Rule 611 (the order protection rule) and Rule 610(e) (locked/crossed market restrictions), plus related definitions. 60-day comment period. proposal, not final.. but the direction is unmistakable

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) June 11, 2026

this is one of the biggest structural barriers to tokenized US equities trading in DeFi today. an AMM cannot comply with 611 by construction. it executes against a bonding curve at whatever the pool price is, with slippage, at block-time granularity

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) June 11, 2026

610(e) is the same story. AMM prices drift continuously with flow and would routinely lock or cross the displayed NBBO, which venues are currently required to prevent

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) June 11, 2026

tokenized NMS stocks still face a host of other questions re: exchange/ATS registration questions, clearance and settlement, and many other rules not designed for defi or peer-to-peer trading. we hope many of these will be addressed in the SEC’s forthcoming “innovation exemption”

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) June 11, 2026

two decades of equity market structure built around a single rule, and the SEC wants to lift it, which is an important step in clearing the way for the next step of innovation in trading equity securities

— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) June 11, 2026

Christopher Perkins, CEO of 250 Digital Asset Management, said:

Been waiting for this…
Reg NMS/the NBBO has been one of the biggest challenges and obstacles to unlocking the benefits of tokenized equities.
If rescinded, it’s a whole new ballgame. Major unlock for DeFi. Incumbents won’t be happy. https://t.co/zZos7Ka3QY

— Christopher Perkins 🦅🌎⚓️NYC (@perkinscr97) June 12, 2026

Tyler Gellasch, president and chief executive of Healthy Markets Association, said:

Rule 611 just prevents exchanges from executing at bad prices. So this expressly allows brokers, market makers, and exchanges to rip off investors. It is the first major example of repealing tradfi rules to enable currently-allowed crypto market abuses in tradfi. https://t.co/dvZBqWVe6p

— Tyler Gellasch (@TylerGellasch) June 12, 2026

Olivia Vande Woude, business development, tokenization at Ava Labs, argued that when an investor buys stock through a U.S. broker, they transact at NBBO or better, because of Reg NMS. She said: “That obligation is why retail investors can trust that the price on their screen is the real one. A token that claims to represent that same share should clear the same bar; anything less is a different instrument sporting the same ticker.”

the tokenized equity debate is missing a word: NBBO. If the token is the share, it should trade at the share's price, @ NBBO or better, accountable to a standard, not a venue's discretion. I wrote up a short piece on why: https://t.co/4QFS3jbImn

— Olivia Vande Woude (@cryptoreine) June 1, 2026

So the bar for the category should be simple & public: a tokenized equity should trade at NBBO or better. Ask any issuer whether theirs does, and what percentage of the time it lands inside the spread.”