Paul Atkins, Chairman of the Securities and Alternate Fee (SEC), acknowledged that Preliminary Coin Choices (ICOs) of cryptocurrency networks – equivalent to Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) – in addition to non-fungible tokens (NFT) and utility tokens don’t represent securities. This reclassification removes these property from the company’s orbit and transfers them to the extra versatile regulatory regime of the Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee (CFTC).
Atkins made these statements on Tuesday, December 9, 2025 throughout the Blockchain Affiliation’s annual summit. On the time of his intervention, the official detailed a taxonomy of property that divides the sector into 4 classes.
Underneath this scheme, solely “securities tokens”—understood as on-chain representations of already regulated conventional monetary property— will stay underneath the surveillance of the SEC. The opposite three teams are exempt from this label.
«ICOs transcend all 4 classes. Three of these areas are on the CFTC’s aspect, so we’ll allow them to fear about that, and we’ll deal with tokenized securities (securities),” Atkins mentioned.
“We wish to promote that,” he mentioned throughout the summit. “These ICOs don’t match our definition of worth as we at present interpret it.”
Within the new yr, all of the seeds we now have planted will start to germinate. We are going to prioritize innovation exemption for cryptocurrency merchandise, lowering compliance prices and inspiring experimentation.
Paul Atkins, president of the SEC.
This place is predicated on the “Challenge Crypto” technique, introduced by Atkins in his July 31, 2025 speech titled “American Management within the Digital Finance Revolution.”
In that textual content, which serves as the premise for his present feedback, he argued that most cryptoassets aren’t securities and proposed particular exemptions for decentralized community token ICOs.
The measure could revive the ICO market in the US, a financing mechanism that exploded throughout the 2017 cryptocurrency increase, elevating greater than $2 trillion globally, as reported by CriptoNoticias.
After years of paralysis as a result of SEC lawsuits underneath earlier administrations, this new imaginative and prescient would permit ICOs to flourish while not having to attend for laws.
In the end, the brand new regulatory panorama is shaping as much as be a victory for ETH and SOL holders. By becoming your decentralized networks into classes freed from heavy paperwork, you clear the best way for innovation and authorized uncertainty for the ecosystem is lowered.
