Early Wednesday morning, a coalition of leading US crypto exchanges, custodians, and market makers announced the Transparency Alliance, an industry group publicly endorsing a standardized disclosure framework for token issuers. The launch arrives at a delicate moment for digital-asset policy in Washington: the Securities and Exchange Commission has just postponed its highly anticipated Innovation Exemption for tokenized stocks after pushback from incumbent exchanges. The two events are connected, and together they hint at where the next phase of crypto market structure is heading.
What the Transparency Alliance actually does
The Alliance is organized by Blockworks, the digital-asset media and research firm, and is built on top of its Token Transparency Framework, a disclosure standard first published in June 2025. Blockworks describes the group as a coalition of exchanges, custodians, market makers, venture funds, launch platforms, and stablecoin issuers publicly endorsing the Token Transparency Framework.5 Founding members include Coinbase, Binance.US, Kraken, Grayscale, Anchorage Digital, MoonPay, BitGo, VanEck, Bitwise, Copper, Jito, Securitize, GSR, FalconX, Auros, Aerodrome, Aave, Ripple, and MEXC, among others. Roughly mapped to the categories above: Coinbase, Binance.US, Kraken and MEXC sit on the exchange side; Anchorage Digital, BitGo and Copper are custodians; GSR, FalconX and Auros are market makers; Grayscale, VanEck and Bitwise are asset managers; and Jito, Aerodrome, Aave, Securitize, MoonPay and Ripple cover protocols and infrastructure.
The framework asks token issuers to disclose roughly the same categories of information that the SEC requires from public companies: insider allocations, market maker deals, listing terms and other key data. It includes two filing types: a one-time disclosure for new token launches, modeled loosely on an S-1 registration filing, and a continuously updated filing for mature protocols. Blockworks has branded these the B-1 and B-2 filings, with the stated aspiration that the B-1 become the new default for market entry and the B-2 the standard for continual disclosure.
Adoption is early but accelerating. Since launch, Blockworks has met with the SEC and CFTC about the framework as recently as April 2026, 44 protocols have completed filings, and Blockworks aims to surpass 200 by year-end 2026.1 Filers so far include Morpho, Jupiter, Spark and dYdX. A recent audit found fewer than 1% of 150+ audited protocols publicly disclose their market-making arrangements to investors, and only 3% maintain a dedicated IR hub. That gap between current practice and stock-market norms is the entire reason the Alliance exists.
Why the timing matters
The Alliance announcement landed less than two weeks after the SEC's Innovation Exemption hit an unexpected wall. The SEC abruptly delayed the release of its long-previewed "innovation exemption" this week after closed-door meetings in which Nasdaq, NYSE, and Cboe leadership pushed back hard on the proposed framework. The exemption would have created a 12 to 36 month sandbox letting US firms issue and trade tokenized securities, including tokenized US stocks, without full SEC registration. SEC Chair Paul Atkins had previewed the rollout as "imminent" just weeks earlier, with multiple outlets reporting a late-May target.2
The objection from incumbent exchanges was structural. The listed venues argued, successfully, that the draft as written would carve out a parallel equity market without the same disclosure and operational plumbing the rest of the system runs on. The framework is not dead, but it is being rewritten to either route tokenized-equity venues through the existing NMS rails or require them to register as ATSs, which is a heavier lift than the original sandbox.
This is where the Alliance becomes more than a public-relations exercise. If crypto-native platforms can show that they already back standardized issuer disclosures (supply schedules, insider allocations, market-maker arrangements, financial data), they make a stronger case that the Innovation Exemption can ship without weakening investor protections. Blockworks has been explicit about that conversation, meeting with staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission as recently as April 2026. "It's clear that regulators want better classification, better disclosure, and more market integrity in crypto," Yanowitz told CoinDesk. That signal from regulators is the lever the Alliance is using to push members toward standardized filings rather than treat them as optional.
The information gap the Alliance is trying to close
The premise behind the framework is borrowed directly from US securities law. Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz framed the problem in the launch announcement by contrasting equity and token markets. "Our mission is to build trust in onchain markets. The core issue is simple: when investors buy a stock, they understand what they own. When they buy a token, they do not. Critical information is often scattered, incomplete, or unavailable. We launched the Token Transparency Framework to bring disclosures to crypto and to improve the industry," Yanowitz said. That asymmetry is what disclosure regimes exist to fix, and it is the reason the framework is sometimes described as a "crypto-native S-1."
The same logic helped build modern equity markets. Before the creation of the SEC in 1934, investors had little information about companies and their equities, leading to a lack of participation in the stock market. The introduction of securities regulation and insider trading laws aimed to create a perception of fairness, encouraging broader participation. This effort seems to have worked, with an estimated 62% of US adults now owning equities, compared to less than 3% in the 1930s.3
Crypto faces a version of the same problem. Token holders frequently learn after the fact that founders sold into liquidity, that a market maker received a generous options package, or that a "community" allocation was concentrated in a handful of wallets. The Transparency Alliance argues this information should be on the record at launch, the same way an IPO prospectus puts every material fact in front of a buyer.
How the two policy tracks connect
The Innovation Exemption and the Transparency Alliance address different parts of the same gap. The exemption is a targeted regulatory carve-out that would let tokenized versions of publicly listed stocks trade on blockchain networks without the full registration burden traditionally required of securities offerings. It is narrow by design: it would not legalize tokenized securities broadly, but rather create a defined sandbox where qualified issuers and platforms can offer tokenized equities under modified disclosure and operational requirements. Tokens issued under the exemption are expected to represent economic exposure to underlying shares rather than direct legal ownership of them. The Alliance is the private-sector counterpart: a voluntary disclosure standard that could fill in operational detail the exemption leaves vague.
The market opportunity is already material. Even before formal rules, tokenized stocks hit $1.4 billion across 2,246 assets, up nearly 30% in 30 days.4 Most of that volume sits offshore today, on products like Backed Finance's bSTOCK on Solana. Bringing it onshore requires both a legal pathway and credible disclosure plumbing. The Alliance argues that exchanges and protocols can build the second half without waiting for the first.
What to watch over the next two quarters
Three signals will determine whether the Alliance becomes a real market institution or stops at a press release:
Whether founding exchanges actually condition listings on a completed B-1 filing, rather than treating it as optional.
Whether the SEC's revised Innovation Exemption references third-party disclosure standards as part of the eligibility test.
Whether protocols beyond the first 44, particularly the layer-1 and infrastructure projects that have been notably absent, start filing.
The broader regulatory backdrop is moving in the same direction. The CLARITY Act is working through Congress, the GENIUS Act has settled the rules for stablecoins, and the tokenization of real-world assets is being treated as inevitable rather than experimental. In that environment, the absence of a shared disclosure standard had become one of the more embarrassing gaps in the crypto stack. The Transparency Alliance is the industry's attempt to close it before regulators force the issue on terms the industry would not have chosen.