Last Updated: June 18, 2025


The Digital Chamber’s Token Alliance Leadership Committee recently took a proactive role in framing out an agenda for the SEC’s new Chair and Commission majority by offering a list of policy priorities designed to start the process of rebuilding trust with the global digital asset community. Below are the TDC 2025 SEC priorities that have been achieved or are currently in progress.

Day 1:

Corporation Finance:

IN PROCESS: Rescind 2019 Framework for “Investment Contract” Analysis of Digital Assets.

  • The list of considerations is overly broad, lacks prioritization from most to least important, and is impractical to properly apply.
  • Additionally, the staff has been unwilling to engage with market participants to issue no-action letters that could offer needed clarity on the framework or the application of securities laws to digital assets more broadly.

Trading and Markets:

ACHIEVED: Formally withdrew and reconsidered the proposed amendments to Rule 3b-16.

  • These rules propose to expand the definition of “exchange” to encompass Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market participants and a potentially wide variety of other market participants who fall into the undefined concept of “communications protocol system.”

Enforcement: 

ACHIEVED: Initiate an immediate review of all existing digital asset-related investigations, Wells notices, and in-process litigation cases. 

ACHIEVED: Seek stays for ongoing litigation cases that do not involve actual fraud, investor loss, or risk of imminent harm, allowing time to finalize the Commission’s approach. 

Investment Management:

ACHIEVED: Formally withdrew and reconsidered the proposed Safeguarding Rule.

  • These rules, as proposed, are unworkable for many asset classes, particularly digital assets, and the proposed concept of eliminating state banks and trusts from the definition of qualified custodian has no basis or justification. The SEC must formally withdraw these proposed rules.

OCA 

ACHIEVED: Rescind SAB 121 and, if necessary, publish a revocation order in the Federal Register. 

  • SAB 121 imposes undue burdens on digital asset custodians by requiring them to hold assets on their balance sheets, creating accounting challenges and deterring innovation in the digital asset space. Rescinding the Bulletin and publishing a revocation order in the Federal Register will restore a balanced regulatory approach. 
  • Issued by SEC staff in March 2022. 
  • In 2023, GAO found that SAB 121 was a rule under the APA and was improperly issued. 
  • Congress passed bipartisan legislation to repeal in May 2024, vetoed by Biden. 
  • SEC staff has been providing selective exemptive relief to a few market participants from SAB 121 with absolutely no transparency and outside the standard no-action letter process. 

FIRST 30 DAYS 

Corporation Finance 

IN PROGRESS: Issue No-Action Letters, Exemptive Relief or Commission Statements – listed in order of priority: 

  • State that certain technology functions on a blockchain network are not securities transactions. 
  • Provide no-action relief that investment contracts are not equity securities under the ’33 Act and ’34 Act. 

IN PROGRESS: Issue no-action relief or Commission Statements to specific market participants and then commence efforts on rulemaking proposal for specific disclosure standards for investment contracts with underlying digital assets or digital assets that implicate the securities laws, depending on which approach is taken. 

  • The current ’34 Act reporting regime clearly does not work for these types of assets.
  • We need a new set of disclosure standards that take into account the unique characteristics of digital assets and the features of those assets that are important to investors. 
  • Excellent progress has already been made here by the industry on a disclosure framework that we fully support. It has currently been published for comment by the GDCA. We’re happy to provide a copy of the document if helpful. 

Enforcement 

IN PROGRESS: Use discretionary enforcement authority in cases where there is no real fraud or investor loss or that are theory- based, such as secondary trading cases where the theory is that most digital assets are securities, and ask courts to dismiss the case or settle the case, provided the SEC clearly has jurisdiction. 

  • Allow “No admit/No deny” settlements. 
  • Limit penalties to nominal fees where appropriate. 
  • Limit SEC appeals on theory- only cases. 

ACHIEVED: Use discretionary enforcement authority to issue Termination Letters on Wells notices and formally end all investigations related to digital assets that are not based on fraud or imminent loss. 

ACHIEVED: Revisit the size of the Crypto Unit. 

  • Outsized Crypto Assets unit staff number needs to be reallocated, or the name and focus of the unit needs to be changed, to increase industry trust. 

ACHIEVED: Put an immediate end to Division’s practice of limiting Registered Investment Company investments into OTC-traded and Canadian exchange-traded spot crypto funds and futures funds.

  • IM has been improperly limiting RICs from making these investments since 2015/2016, despite an absence of statutory or rules-based authority.
  • RICs that push back are told that the staff will direct the full force of the SEC’s enforcement division their way.
  • Directives are generally provided orally and not in writing.

DAYS 30 – 90 

Enforcement 

IN PROGRESS: Continue efforts to right-size Enforcement’s focus on the digital asset industry to help build trust in the global community. 

ACHIEVED: Provide a reasonable path to registration for digital asset-related businesses and issuers seeking to issue digital assets that implicate the securities law.

  • Staff routinely blocks or slow walks registration statements of companies operating in the digital asset space.
  • Companies face years of delay or refusal to approve.
  • Corp Fin isn’t honoring MJDS path for crypto-related businesses – comments coming from IM claiming that companies holding digital assets are investment companies and from the crypto office asking for in-depth legal analysis of why assets purchased on non-US crypto exchanges are not securities.

IN PROCESS: Approve amended rule filings to allow In-Kind Contributions for spot BTC and ETH ETFs.

  • The SEC required that issuers remove this element as a condition to approval with no clear explanation.
  • In-kind contributions are a standard feature of similar listed products in Canada and other highly regulated jurisdictions.
  • Market makers and other participants often buy baskets of the securities underlying an ETF to create ETF shares. Consistent with the idea that broker-dealers need to be able to transact in digital assets, they need to be able to purchase BTC and ETH in the spot markets for ETF share creation purposes.

IN PROCESS: Approve additional spot ETF applications for other digital assets – BITW, SOL, XRP, etc.

  • Reinstitute approving applications in the order they are received. Permitting market forces, such as first-mover advantage influences, market dynamics, and participant behavior, encourages innovation and the creation of new products that increase investor choices.

IN PROCESS: Approve 19b-4 applications for additional spot ETF applications for other digital assets – BITW, SOL, XRP, etc.

IN PROCESS: Allow spot digital asset ETF issuers to stake tokens to validator nodes to earn staking rewards for investors.

View the full TDC SEC 2025 priorities list here.

If you have any questions, please reach out to Policy@digitalchamber.org