The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s landmark crypto safe harbor proposal has cleared what may be its final administrative checkpoint before hitting the public docket, and SEC Chair Paul Atkins says the formal release is coming “shortly.”
Speaking on April 6 at the inaugural Digital Assets and Emerging Technology Policy Summit, co-hosted by Vanderbilt University and the Blockchain Association in Nashville, Atkins confirmed that Regulation Crypto Assets, the agency’s proposed safe harbor framework, has been submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
OIRA, a division within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, is the final regulatory gatekeeping body that reviews major federal rules before they can be published in the Federal Register and opened for public comment.
“We’ll have Reg Crypto that we’ll be proposing here shortly,” Atkins told attendees at the invite-only roundtable. “It’s in fact at OIRA right now, which is the next step before being published, so that’s exciting.”
The OIRA review process typically takes between 30 and 90 days. Once complete, the proposal will be published for public comment, a standard requirement before any rule can be finalized. That means the crypto industry could have its first look at a formal, voteable SEC crypto framework within weeks.
Your completely free resource hub designed to boost your knowledge of cryptocurrencies
What Regulation Crypto Assets proposes
First announced in Atkins’ March 17 remarks at the DC Blockchain Summit, Regulation Crypto Assets is structured around three core pillars designed to give crypto projects a compliant path forward without the immediate burden of full securities registration.
The startup exemption would allow early-stage projects to raise up to approximately $5 million over a four-year period, with requirements for principles-based disclosures similar to those already common in crypto white papers. The four-year window is designed as a “regulatory runway”, giving development teams time to build out their networks and work toward sufficient decentralization before facing the full weight of securities law compliance.
The fundraising exemption targets more developed issuers, allowing them to raise up to $75 million within any 12-month period. Projects relying on this path must provide structured financial disclosures, including audited financial statements and a discussion of their financial condition, a higher bar than the startup track, but still a significantly lighter touch than a full securities registration.
The investment contract safe harbor is perhaps the most consequential of the three. It would allow a digital asset to exit securities law classification entirely once its issuer has permanently ceased all “essential managerial efforts” originally tied to investor expectations under the investment contract. In plain terms: once a project reaches sufficient maturity and decentralization, its token could stop being treated as a security, a transition that has been legally murky for years.
Atkins also previewed a fourth component that is separate from Reg Crypto but closely tied to it: a DeFi-focused innovation exemption under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This would function as a regulatory sandbox, allowing onchain protocols and digital asset platforms to operate under limited, structured relief while the SEC monitors results, with formal parameters to be published soon.
The Vanderbilt summit and the permanence argument
The April 6 summit, held at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, brought together a curated group of policymakers, academics, industry leaders, and technical experts for what organizers described as a focused, high-level roundtable.
Atkins made clear that while agency rulemaking can move quickly, it is ultimately fragile. The SEC’s crypto policy agenda, he argued, needs to be anchored in legislation, not just regulatory decisions, to survive future administrations.
“We can do a lot regulatorily, but we just have to make sure it takes root and can’t be done away with,” he said. He called on attendees to engage with the 2026 midterm elections to ensure pro-crypto legislators remain in Congress.
Atkins has made this point consistently since taking the chair: the SEC is acting independently because it must, but congressional legislation, not agency rulemaking, is the only thing that can lock in these changes for the long term. Lawmakers in Washington have been working on crypto market structure legislation for over a year, though the process has been repeatedly slowed by disagreements over jurisdiction between the SEC and CFTC.
Blockchain Association vs. Citadel: the debate behind the debate
The same day as Atkins’ summit appearance, a sharper battle was playing out in official filings. The Blockchain Association submitted a formal response to the SEC directly rebutting arguments made by Citadel Securities, one of the world’s largest market-making firms, over the shape of the incoming innovation exemption.
The dispute centers on how decentralized finance infrastructure should be treated under securities law. The Blockchain Association argues that tools such as validators, smart contracts, and non-custodial protocols function as neutral technical infrastructure, not as intermediaries like brokers or exchanges, and that applying traditional exchange-registration requirements to them would be a fundamental category error.
Citadel Securities has pushed back, urging the SEC to require formal notice-and-comment rulemaking rather than proceeding via exemptions, a position the Association characterizes as a delay strategy that would push U.S. innovation offshore. The Association also pushed back on the framing that innovation exemptions amount to a regulatory “free pass,” noting that firms relying on them must still meet investor protection requirements, submit detailed operational plans, and report results back to the SEC.
Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger framed the stakes directly: “Tokenization is about bringing better technology to the most important capital markets in the world.” At the Vanderbilt event, Atkins sided with the Association’s position, affirming that the SEC has the legal authority to pursue exemptions without going through full traditional rulemaking.
The broader regulatory architecture taking shape
Reg Crypto does not land in a vacuum. In mid-March, the SEC and CFTC jointly published an interpretive release introducing a formal token taxonomy, the first time either agency had set out, in a single document, clear criteria for classifying digital assets. The joint release defined five categories of crypto tokens, with only one, digital securities, meaning traditional securities in tokenized form, remaining subject to SEC jurisdiction.
At the time, Atkins called it the end of a “decade of uncertainty” for crypto developers. The joint release also marked the first coordinated interpretive action between the SEC and CFTC on digital assets, and the two agencies have since signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Joint Harmonization Initiative, aimed at minimizing regulatory duplication, clarifying product definitions, and synchronizing enforcement policy across both agencies.
Reg Crypto, when published, is expected to build directly on that foundation. It will be put through the SEC’s standard rulemaking process, proposal, public comment period, revision, and final rule, meaning the version that reaches the public will likely be the starting point of a multi-month process, not the end of one.
What happens next
Following OIRA clearance, the proposal will be published in the Federal Register, at which point anyone, from individual developers to institutional investors to consumer advocacy groups, can submit formal comments. The SEC has already signaled it intends to hear from a wide range of stakeholders before finalizing the rule, and Atkins has repeatedly described the Reg Crypto framework as an opening for dialogue, not a final answer.
For the crypto industry, the OIRA milestone represents a meaningful shift in posture from the SEC. Under former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency pursued aggressive enforcement actions against major firms including Coinbase, Ripple, and Kraken, treating most token offerings as unregistered securities. The pivot to a safe harbor model, one that explicitly creates on-ramps rather than dragnet enforcement, is a structural change, not just a rhetorical one.
Builders and legal teams will now be watching two clocks: one counting down to the Federal Register publication of Reg Crypto, and another tracking whether Congress can pass crypto market structure legislation before the next administration gets to reset the table.
