“To deliver on President Trump’s goal to ensure that the United States is the crypto capital of the world, we are embracing innovation to bring more products onshore, creating clear rules of the road for capital raising with crypto assets, and providing clarity as to how market participants can custody and facilitate trading of tokenized securities onchain,” Atkins said in a statement on Tuesday, mentioning his agency’s crypto agenda before any other specific rulemaking effort.
As 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, though the agency has sometimes moved more slowly to issue policies than expected. When Atkins addressed this coming regulation almost four months ago in mid-March, he said it would be proposed in the “coming weeks.”
The busy new SEC agenda has “Regulation Crypto” slated for July, though it’s still under review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. When proposed, it would mark the first major crypto-specific rulemaking pursued under Atkins’ leadership. Though the regulator has established a wide range of staff statements and guidance on crypto, those positions don’t carry the weight of a full rule, which can’t be changed as easily when future leaders arrive at the agency with different ideas.