Policy, Top Stories, SEC, Paul Atkins, News Paul Atkins, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said the initiative is based on the recommendations from this week’s White House crypto report.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins said his agency is launching “Project Crypto” with an aim to make a quick start on the new crypto policies urged by President Donald Trump.
Atkins announced the new initiative in a Thursday speech at the America First Policy Institute, saying the effort will be rooted in the recommendations of the President’s Working Group report issued Wednesday by the White House. He described it as “a commission-wide initiative to modernize the securities rules and regulations to enable America’s financial markets to move on-chain.”
“I have directed the commission staff to draft clear and simple rules of the road for crypto asset
distributions, custody, and trading for public notice and comment,” Atkins said. “While the commission staff works to finalize these regulations, the commission and its staff will in the coming months consider using interpretative, exemptive and other authorities to make sure that archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
Atkins offered a rhetorical reversal from the days when predecessor SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said the vast majority of cryptocurrencies were likely securities that needed to be overseen by the agency.
“Despite what the SEC has said in the past, most crypto assets are not securities,” Atkins said. “But confusion over the application of the ‘Howey test’ has led some innovators to prophylactically treat all crypto assets as such.”
Even as Congress continues to work on complex legislation that will define crypto securities under new law, Atkins suggested his agency will move to begin answering those questions now, working on “clear guidelines that market participants can use to determine whether a crypto asset is a security or subject to an investment contract.”
Even when projects get a securities label, he argued that it should not be a “scarlet letter.”
For crypto securities, he said he’s “asked staff to propose purpose-fit disclosures, exemptions, and safe harbors, including for so-called ‘initial coin offerings,’ ‘airdrops’ and network rewards.”
Atkins underlined Trump’s goal to establish a “golden age” for digital assets in the U.S.
“We will reshore the crypto businesses that fled our country, particularly those that were crippled by the previous administration’s regulation-by-enforcement crusade and ‘Operation Chokepoint 2.0’,” he said.
Read more: Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Age of Crypto’ Takes Shape With White House Working Group Report
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