美国证券交易委员会 (SEC) 着眼于 90 年代的加密货币市场修复，以实现真正的“创新之路”

In a May 8 speech, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the agency could consider a limited “innovation pathway” for on-chain trading systems in the near future. Meanwhile, the agency will reserve formal notice-and-comment rulemaking to determine how crypto platforms fit inside the exchange definition. Atkins tied that idea directly to the SEC's handling of electronic trading in the 1990s. The SEC spent years issuing ad hoc no-action letters as electronic trading challenged the exchange framework, then built Regulation ATS in 1998. The rule was a middle path that allowed alternative trading systems to operate as broker-dealers under specific conditions as the market matured. The original adopting release described the framework as designed to “encourage market innovation” while preserving investor protections. Atkins is pointing at that sequence of targeted guidance first, fit-for-purpose architecture second, as a template for on-chain finance. The two-step reading makes the speech different from generic crypto-policy rhetoric. Atkins appears to be preparing the SEC to allow certain on-chain trading systems to operate inside the regulatory perimeter under conditions, while a longer rulemaking process settles how exchange, broker-dealer, clearing, and transfer-agent definitions apply to software-based markets . For crypto firms that spent years facing enforcement before rules existed, that sequence would represent a genuine departure from recent agency posture. A five-step timeline traces the SEC's regulatory path from 1990s electronic trading through Regulation ATS to Atkins' proposed on-chain innovation pathway. Why on-chain markets force a new architecture Traditional SEC rules were built around separate actors performing separate regulated functions, such as exchanges matching orders, broker-dealers routing and executing them, clearing agencies settling them, and transfer agents recording ownership. A single on-chain protocol can perform all of those functions automaticall