The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins used a Sep. 14 keynote at the Solana Policy Institute summit to deliver a clear message: the agency's crypto rulemaking agend
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins used a Sep. 14 keynote at the Solana Policy Institute summit to deliver a clear message: the agency's crypto rulemaking agenda will proceed regardless of whether the CLARITY Act passes the Senate.
The SEC is the leading U.S. agency responsible for regulating the trading of stocks, bonds and other securities.
Related: Senate votes Tuesday on advancing CLARITY Act
Its jurisdiction over crypto has been one of the most contested questions in digital asset policy, and the CLARITY Act, set for a critical cloture vote on Sep. 15, is designed to settle it by drawing clear lines between the SEC and the CFTC, the regulator that oversees commodities.
Atkins backed the bill but made clear the SEC is not waiting on Congress.
"With or without that legislation, this Administration will deliver for American investors and technological innovators," Atkins said, according to the SEC transcript. "Promises were made, and they will be kept."
Atkins outlined three rulemaking efforts under what the agency calls Project Crypto.
The first, Regulation Crypto Assets, would create a defined pathway for token issuers to raise capital in the U.S. under federal securities law. Atkins called it "one of the most significant steps that this Commission has ever taken to modernize federal securities regulation," according to the transcript.
The second involves updating transfer agent rules, which have not been meaningfully revised in roughly 40 years, Atkins said. Transfer agents are the intermediaries that track who owns stocks and bonds, updating these rules is a prerequisite for tokenized securities to function at institutional scale.
The third is new: Atkins said he has asked SEC staff to develop a proposal that would let investment advisers self-custody crypto in cases where a qualified third-party custodian does not yet exist.
He also opened a path for state-chartered trust companies to serve as custodians, directly addressing a bottleneck that has kept many registered investment advisers on the sidelines.
Atkins framed the three initiatives not as isolated efforts but as "three pillars of a single, rational, and comprehensive regulatory architecture" for how crypto assets are issued, traded, transferred and held under American law, according to the transcript.
With the cloture vote needing 60 senators and opposition still building from banking groups and state attorneys general, Atkins' speech effectively told the market not to treat Tuesday as a binary event. The SEC's agenda has its own clock.
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