The agenda lands days before Congress takes up the market structure bill
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced proposed rule changes on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, that chair Paul Atkins said would “help clarify the regulatory framework for crypto assets and provide greater certainty to the market.” The release is part of the agency’s annual regulatory agenda and lands while Congress debates a crypto market structure bill that would shift much of the oversight and enforcement of the industry from the SEC to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
What Atkins put on the agenda
The agenda item covers three connected workstreams: rules for tokenized securities, rules for capital raising with digital assets, and broader disclosure reform. Atkins framed the proposals as aligning the agency with the Trump administration’s stated policy goals on crypto, which included clarification on tokenized securities and capital raising with digital assets.
The proposed rules came as the U.S. Congress is debating provisions in a crypto market structure bill expected to shift much of the oversight and enforcement of the industry from the SEC to the CFTC. In March, Atkins said the SEC’s stance on crypto was shifting away from enforcement and toward rulemaking, and the agenda release is the first formal expression of that shift since the spring.
What the proposed rules actually aim to do
The proposed rules may provide greater certainty to the market, facilitate capital formation, and accommodate innovation within the crypto asset markets while, at the same time, ensuring that investors are adequately protected and provided with the information they need to make informed investment decisions, Atkins said in the Tuesday notice. The agenda ties the rule proposals directly to the same three priorities Atkins has named in every crypto speech this year — tokenized securities treatment, capital formation pathways, and disclosure modernization.
Why critics call it pay-to-play
The SEC’s approach to crypto under U.S. President Donald Trump and Atkins has many critics accusing the administration of a “pay-to-play scheme.” Democratic lawmakers said in a January letter that Trump and those associated with him had financially benefited from the administration’s hands-off posture toward the industry. Atkins’s predecessor, Gary Gensler, had pursued dozens of enforcement actions against crypto issuers and exchanges; the current commission has dropped or paused most of those cases.
The SEC’s decision to let those who violated the securities laws go without consequences, together with recent statements by Chair Atkins that “most crypto tokens are not securities,” despite holdings by federal district courts that at least some tokens are, has been a consistent line of criticism from Senate Democrats throughout the year.
Where Trump himself stands
Answering questions from reporters on Monday, Trump said that he “got involved in [crypto] a little bit for politics” after calling Bitcoin (BTC) a “scam” following his first term. He initially said that he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrencies, but in his second term the president and his family have launched a series of token and NFT ventures that critics point to as evidence of the pay-to-play concern.
Why the timing matters for the market structure bill
The crypto market structure bill under negotiation in the Senate would clarify which agency has authority over which digital assets. If the SEC is already writing rules on tokenized securities and capital formation before Congress finishes the bill, the agency is effectively pre-empting the legislative resolution of the same question. Market participants who want a single, settled rulebook are watching the parallel timelines closely: a Senate vote could arrive in September, while the SEC’s proposed rules are now open for public comment on a standard 60-day window.
What happens next
The agenda publication opens a comment period on the proposed rules. SEC staff will then revise the proposals based on the comments received and re-publish them for a second comment period before any final adoption. The agenda does not commit to a specific date for final adoption, but past crypto rulemakings suggest the process takes roughly twelve to eighteen months from agenda publication to effective rule. The 2026 agenda is therefore best read as the shape of the next year and a half of SEC crypto policy, not as a near-term regulatory event.
For token issuers, capital-raisers and the exchanges that list digital assets, the agenda tells them where the SEC’s rule writers will spend their time. For the CFTC, it tells them which fights are about to be re-fought at the rulemaking level. For Congress, it tells them that the agency they have been telling to wait is no longer waiting.
The systemic context: how the SEC got here
The agenda publication closes a year-long pivot inside the SEC. Under former chair Gary Gensler, the agency pursued more than one hundred enforcement actions against crypto issuers, exchanges and intermediaries, including high-profile cases against Ripple Labs, Coinbase and Binance. The posture produced a multi-year backlog in federal crypto litigation and pushed most institutional token issuers offshore to structure their offerings around non-U.S. legal wrappers.
Atkins, confirmed in April 2025, has systematically reversed that posture. The standing enforcement actions against major crypto defendants have been settled, paused or dropped. The Division of Enforcement has been reorganized around fraud cases rather than registration cases. The Corporation Finance division has been told to issue guidance on when a token does not need to register as a security — the Atkins “most crypto tokens are not securities” line that critics cite as a precondition for the proposed rules. The 2026 agenda is the formal rule-writing expression of those personnel and posture changes, and it is the document that future Chair successors will have to either extend or reverse.
For the banking and affiliate ecosystem that has historically routed crypto exposure through custodian banks and broker-dealer affiliates, the agenda also matters. The capital formation rule is expected to address how a registered broker-dealer can intermediate a digital asset offering without triggering a separate SEC enforcement case against the affiliate that priced it. Until that rule is final, every institutional token deal is being structured against an unsettled rulebook, which has been the binding constraint on the size of the tokenized securities market through 2025 and the first half of 2026.