“To meet President Trump’s goal of ensuring America is the crypto capital of the world, we are embracing innovation to bring more products to the country, creating clear rules for raising capital with crypto assets, and providing clarity on how market participants can custody and facilitate trading of tokenized securities on-chain,” Atkins said in a statement Tuesday, mentioning his agency’s crypto agenda before any other specific rulemaking efforts.
While the process to advance a crypto market structure bill has languished in Congress, the SEC has been a bright spot for the industry’s regulatory hopes, although the agency has sometimes moved more slowly to issue policies than expected. When Atkins addressed this upcoming regulation nearly four months ago, in mid-March, he said it would be proposed in the “coming weeks.”
The SEC’s busy new schedule has “Crypto Regulation” scheduled for July, although it is still under review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. When proposed, it would mark the first major crypto-specific rulemaking carried out under Atkins’ leadership. Although the regulator has laid out a wide range of staff statements and guidance on crypto, those positions do not carry the weight of a full rule, which cannot be changed as easily when future leaders come to the agency with different ideas.
