The SEC has proposed its first crypto-specific securities framework in the agency's 90-year history
On August 18, 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, creating a tailored offering and disclosure regime for token issuers. The proposal marks a structural shift in how crypto fundraising fits inside U.S. securities law.
The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed Regulation Crypto Assets on August 18, 2026, establishing the first offering and disclosure framework designed specifically for crypto assets rather than adapted from rules written for corporate stock. According to analysis from Galaxy, this is the first set of U.S. securities rules built around the offer and sale of crypto assets from the ground up.
The proposal’s core structure, as reported by Securities Lawyer 101, creates two exemptions from Securities Act registration for offerings of covered investment contracts involving crypto assets: a startup exemption capped at $5 million and a fundraising exemption capped at $75 million. Davis Polk describes the framework as also including a token-specific disclosure regime, a safe harbor, and broad preemption of state blue-sky laws.
Critically, as Steptoe notes, Regulation Crypto Assets is a capital-formation framework for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. It is not a token-classification rule. That distinction matters: the proposal addresses how issuers may raise capital and what they must disclose, not whether a given token is a security in the first instance.
There's news that the SEC is finally going to release reg crypto in the next week or so. Laura Shin
Tech Times reported that the SEC published the first formal crypto-specific fundraising rule in the agency’s 90-year history, while noting that a separate proposal to ease trading in tokenized stocks remains stalled because of existing equity-market infrastructure constraints.
On August 13, Laura Shin, the crypto journalist and founder of Unchained, stated that “there’s news that the SEC is finally going to release reg crypto in the next week or so.” The gate on that call was publication on or before August 27. The proposal landed on August 18, five days after she said it and nine days before the deadline. Her phrasing was approximate rather than precise, but the underlying claim resolved clearly within the window she described.
What the evidence establishes is less about timing than about scope. Sullivan and Cromwell describes the proposal as an offering and disclosure framework for covered investment contracts involving crypto assets that are not themselves securities. That framing signals what the rule does and does not do: it gives token issuers a legal path to raise capital with defined caps and disclosure obligations, while leaving classification questions for another day. The industry has waited years for exactly this kind of structural clarity, and the proposal, whatever its final form after comment, sets a concrete baseline that did not previously exist.