SEC Sent a Crypto Regulatory Framework to the White House: What It Actually Says

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission submitted a commission-level interpretive framework to the White House, outlining how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets.

The document is currently under review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and represents the most substantive regulatory guidance the SEC has produced on digital assets under Chairman Paul Atkins.

What the Framework Contains

The document establishes four interconnected pieces of guidance that the industry has been waiting years to receive in writing.

The first is a token taxonomy, a categorization system for digital assets based on their use, structure, and distribution. This is the foundational piece. Before you can regulate something, you have to define what it is. The absence of a clear taxonomy is what allowed the previous SEC administration to apply securities law broadly and inconsistently, treating different tokens as securities in enforcement actions without ever publishing the criteria it was using.

The second piece addresses jurisdictional clarity between the SEC and the CFTC. The boundary between securities and commodities has been the central unresolved question in U.S. crypto regulation for a decade. Bitcoin is widely accepted as a commodity. Ethereum’s status has been contested. Everything else has existed in a gray zone where both agencies could theoretically claim jurisdiction and neither would fully commit. The framework proposes criteria for resolving that boundary.

The third component covers investment contract analysis, specifically how investment contracts are formed and how they can be terminated. The termination pathway is the significant innovation here. Under the previous regulatory posture, once a token was deemed a security it remained a security indefinitely. The new framework suggests tokens could transition out of security status as their networks mature and decentralize. That is a meaningful shift for projects that launched as securities but have since developed genuine utility and distributed ownership.

The fourth piece proposes registration pathways for capital raising and clarifies the role of intermediaries including transfer agents and wallets. Clear registration pathways mean projects can raise capital legally in the United States rather than structuring around SEC jurisdiction or launching offshore.

The Political Context

Chairman Paul Atkins has explicitly positioned this framework as a departure from what the industry called regulation by enforcement, the prior approach under Gary Gensler where the SEC established policy through lawsuits rather than published guidance. The submission to OIRA for White House review is a procedural step before formal rulemaking, meaning this is not yet law and will go through a comment and revision process.

The timing is not coincidental. The CFTC submitted its own measures to the White House on the same day, covering prediction markets. A simultaneous submission from both agencies signals coordinated regulatory action rather than independent agency initiative. Someone in the administration coordinated the timing, and that someone almost certainly sits in the White House crypto policy structure that Patrick Witt has been building.

This lands three days after Trump publicly pressured banks to cooperate with crypto legislation and two days after his private meeting with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. The executive branch is pushing on multiple fronts simultaneously: legislative pressure on stablecoins through the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts, and now regulatory guidance through the SEC and CFTC moving in parallel.

What Changes If This Becomes Final

For projects currently operating in the gray zone, a published token taxonomy with clear termination criteria for investment contract status would allow legal counsel to give definitive answers that they currently cannot. For exchanges, jurisdictional clarity between the SEC and CFTC ends the regulatory arbitrage problem where both agencies could claim oversight and neither would provide clear rules. For institutional capital sitting on the sidelines specifically because of regulatory uncertainty, this framework removes one of the primary stated reasons for not allocating.

None of that happens immediately. The framework is at the prerule stage, meaning formal rulemaking has not begun. Comment periods, revisions, and potential legal challenges could delay final implementation by months or years. The direction is clear. The timeline is not.

What exists today is a written document from the SEC stating how it intends to categorize and regulate crypto assets. That alone is more than the industry had last year.

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