SEC pulls its Regulation Crypto vote off the calendar with no new date
The agency's first major crypto rulemaking was hours from being proposed when the meeting was scrapped, leaving a token offering safe harbour in limbo.
WASHINGTON —
The Securities and Exchange Commission has postponed the open meeting at which it planned to propose Regulation Crypto, the agency's first comprehensive rulemaking for digital asset offerings. No replacement date has been set, and staff cited an unforeseen scheduling problem rather than a substantive dispute.
The draft proposal, running to several hundred pages, would create a conditional exemption allowing token issuers to raise capital without full securities registration, provided they meet disclosure, reporting and distribution requirements. Lawyers who have reviewed summaries describe it as a safe harbour with an expiry: projects would have a fixed window to decentralise or fall back into the standard registration regime.
The delay matters because the legislative track has also stalled. The Senate left Washington in August without holding a procedural vote on the Clarity Act, the bill intended to divide oversight of digital assets between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. A cloture test is now expected in mid-September, and sixty votes remain the bar.
CFTC leadership has said publicly that the agency will write its own digital commodity rules regardless of whether Congress acts, raising the prospect of two regulators arriving at overlapping definitions of the same instruments. Market participants have warned that a mismatch would push token listings offshore rather than resolve the jurisdictional question.
Issuers waiting on the proposal are in a familiar position: the enforcement posture has softened, but the rulebook that would replace it has not arrived. Until a comment period opens, the practical guidance for a US token launch remains a patchwork of settled cases and staff statements.