A 267-page SEC proposal to gut two foundational pillars of US equity market structure just became the most important crypto regulation of 2026, according to research firm Benchmark. Not a stablecoin bill. Not a Bitcoin ETF tweak. A pair of obscure trading rules most people have never heard of.

On June 11, the SEC proposed rescinding Rule 611 and Rule 610(e) under Regulation NMS, the framework that has governed how US stocks are quoted and traded since 2005. Benchmark called it the year’s “most consequential” US crypto rule, a designation that says less about the proposal’s intent and more about where its consequences land.

What these rules actually do

Rule 611, known as the trade-through rule, requires brokers to route orders to whichever venue is displaying the best price. In English: if the NYSE is showing a better bid than Nasdaq, your broker has to send the order to the NYSE. It was designed to protect retail investors from getting worse prices when better ones existed elsewhere.

Rule 610(e) restricts locked or crossed quotations, situations where the bid price at one exchange equals or exceeds the ask price at another.

Why crypto cares about equity market plumbing

The crypto industry has been building infrastructure to trade tokenized versions of real-world assets, including US stocks, for years. The technical capability exists. What didn’t exist was regulatory permission.

Rule 611’s trade-through prohibition effectively meant that any platform trading tokenized equities needed to participate in the National Market System’s routing infrastructure. Without mandatory routing requirements, alternative execution venues, including blockchain-based ones, gain a much clearer path to participation.

The proposal also aims to lower regulatory costs across the board and encourage more flexible execution methods.

SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, has expressed support for the proposal.

The broader regulatory context

The 2005 Regulation NMS framework was itself a massive overhaul at the time, designed to modernize markets that were transitioning from floor-based trading to electronic execution.

The 267-page proposal includes conforming amendments that would adjust related rules to account for the removal of Rules 611 and 610(e), and plans to delay certain market structure reforms that had been scheduled for implementation.

What this means for investors

For traditional equity investors, the removal of trade-through protections introduces a different dynamic. Without Rule 611, the burden shifts to brokers and platforms to demonstrate best execution through other means. Retail investors benefited from guaranteed best-price routing even if they didn’t know it was happening.

Centralized exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq lose a regulatory moat that has channeled order flow in their direction for years.