June 2, 2025/US SEC

By Commissioner Caroline A. Crenshaw

Over the last several months, we have heard repeatedly that the Commission, and its new Crypto Task Force, are embarking on a quest to give the crypto industry regulatory clarity.[1] We’ve heard “change is coming fast” [2] for crypto at the SEC and that the crypto markets will soon be free from the “limbo” they’ve been “languishing […] in for years.”[3]

In the name of this clarity, we’ve seen staff statement after staff statement, pronouncing that all sorts of crypto assets are not securities.[4] And yet, now we see no objection to the effectiveness of new exchange-traded funds[5] that assert certain crypto assets—ETH and SOL—actually are securities.[6] Does this Commission, in fact, believe that ETH and SOL are securities?

How is it that these crypto assets are supposedly not securities when it comes to registration requirements, but conveniently are securities when a registrant sees an opportunity to sell a new product?

If you’re confused, join the club. These developments lay bare that we are not actually chasing crypto regulatory clarity — these assets cannot be both securities and not securities at the exact same time.[7] Rather than clarity, it seems we are simply getting out of the way of anything and everything in the crypto space. In so doing, we are thwarting any meaningful attempt to apply a coherent regime to crypto assets and rewarding a maximally aggressive approach to entering our markets. This results in opportunistic – and deeply inconsistent – legal interpretations. Even our staff can’t reconcile these inconsistencies, though their concerns seem to matter less to certain industry participants these days.[8]

So far, the Commission and The Crypto Task Force’s journey to clarity has only taken us further and further adrift in increasingly muddy waters of our own making.