SEC Launches Project Crypto
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Good morning,
“We are at the threshold of a new era in the history of our markets. Project Crypto is a Commission-wide initiative to modernize the securities rules and regulations to enable America’s financial markets to move on.” - (Paul Atkins, Chairman of the SEC)
Although we’re taking a short break for the summer and will be back towards the end of August with our usual weekly Satellite, we didn’t want to miss the chance to highlight a major development out of Washington.
On July 31st, Paul Atkins, the new SEC Chair under the Trump administration, gave a speech that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago, and certainly when we launched our first blockchain fund in 2018.
Far from merely crypto-friendly, the speech marks a potentially pivotal moment in the evolution of financial regulation.
Atkins announced the SEC’s "Project Crypto" as part of a broader national effort to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.” He compared the shift from offchain to onchain markets to the transition from ticker tapes to electronic trading, and from paper-based settlements to DTCC. The message was clear: crypto is not a side bet anymore, it’s the next chapter in the evolution of capital markets.
Among the most striking bits:
A commitment to draft clear, purpose-fit regulations for token issuances, airdrops, network rewards, and tokenized securities.
The acknowledgment that “most crypto assets are not securities”, with the SEC promising guidelines for distinguishing tokens from investment contracts.
A push for onchain trading infrastructure (including decentralized systems like AMMs) with legal room for both intermediated and disintermediated models.
A vision for super-apps: unified interfaces combining securities, non-securities, staking, lending, and trading, all under one regulatory umbrella.
A proposed “innovation exemption” allowing builders to go to market faster under principle-based conditions rather than outdated checklists.
And perhaps most importantly, the open invitation to crypto founders and protocols to come back onshore, with Atkins promising that “the SEC welcomes all market participants who are hungry to innovate.”
Even if some of this proves more aspirational than immediately actionable, the tone shift is hard to overstate. For years, US regulators, and specifically the SEC, were seen as hostile to crypto by default. Now, the world’s most powerful capital markets regulator is not just acknowledging blockchain as financial infrastructure, it’s actively laying the groundwork to make it the default.
We’ll be back soon. But in the meantime, it’s worth taking a step back and recognizing how much the Overton window has moved. If we’re entering a new era for crypto markets, this may be the moment it officially began.
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