According to The Defiant, a16z, together with the DeFi Education Fund (DEF), submitted a joint proposal to the U.S. SEC led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, urging the SEC to establish a safe harbor rule stating that decentralized exchange (DEX) protocols and their front-end applications are not subject to a rebuttable presumption of being an “exchange” under the Securities Exchange Act. The proposal outlines four core requirements for exemption from registration: the DEX protocol itself must be non-custodial, autonomously and automatically executable, accessible without permission, and “trust-neutral.” The two organizations cite Commissioner Peirce’s remarks that truly decentralized systems driven by automated software do not need exemptions, emphasizing that a purely autonomous protocol does not involve counterparty default or fraud risks tied to intermediaries, and should receive a clear compliance exemption rather than cumbersome approvals. On the same day, a16z also suggested creating a dedicated registration pathway for centralized crypto platforms with an intermediary character, allowing them to conduct compliant tokenized securities and securities/non-securities mixed trading pairs.