TechFlow News, March 28: According to a Forbes report, B. Salman Banaei, Legal Counsel for Plume, testified before Congress, strongly urging the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to accelerate the development of tokenization rules and to advance full Alternative Trading System (ATS) registration for DeFi protocols—rather than relying solely on “innovation exemptions.”
Banaei criticized the SEC for “putting all its eggs in one basket—the innovation exemption”—calling this approach “foolish,” and warned that imposing trading volume and product restrictions would fail to attract large institutions, “as they will not allocate resources to infrastructure that may cease to exist in two or three years.” He also recommended that the SEC solicit public input on current regulatory incompatibilities and develop permanent solutions.
Plume received SEC approval in October 2025 to become a registered transfer agent, enabling it to handle shareholder records, transfers, and dividends for on-chain tokenized securities; it is currently awaiting its FINRA broker-dealer license. Banaei noted that the SEC’s current leadership window has only 10 months remaining and emphasized the need for swift action to advance real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
