The Global Research Settlement was imposed about 20 years ago in reaction to findings that investment banks were publishing over-optimistic research on internet startups in order to win investment banking business. The firms made subject to the Settlement were those that were found to have pumped internet issuers with their research. The urgency of imposing rules, specifically on those firms, derived from the fact that there were no specific rules as to the production of research and the…

Identifying orders as retail orders (sometimes referred to as "dumb orders") potentially allows counterparties to bid more aggressively to trade with these orders. That is, it gives retail investors a better price because it increases confidence that retail customers are neither (i) trading on superior information nor (ii) sending a flood of orders on the same side of the market that may move market price in a non-random manner.

What results from, or what are the benefits to being the crypto capital of the world? That seems an intermediate goal that can only be justified by some further purposes.  

It's not obvious that the SEC has to do anything to allow for trading of tokenized securities. The big trading issues that the SEC seems to have already dealt with are custody and settlement. The bigger issue remains the question of what is a security, but that is not an issue for the Trading and Markets Division.

As far as trading rule changes, the bigger challenge is going to be 24-hour trading which will create a host of operational issues.