The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission pulled the plug on Friday’s open meeting, where it had planned to unveil “Regulation Crypto,” its first major digital-asset rulemaking. The reason: “an unforeseen scheduling issue,” delivered in an end-of-day statement Thursday. No new date.
The postponement also drags down a related “innovation exemption” for tokenized securities that the commission had been expected to detail at the same session. That exemption is now delayed again, with the White House and Wall Street firms both raising flags, industry sources told CoinDesk.
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins had positioned Reg Crypto as the centerpiece of his digital-assets agenda, calling it “a tailored offering regime for certain investment contracts.” The practical upshot: issuers still lack a durable federal framework for raising capital with tokens, and the agency has leaned on policy statements instead of formal rules. The sector is left waiting to see which branch of government moves first.
One person familiar with the discussions said the White House worried the proposal could “kick a hornet’s nest” while Congress is still negotiating the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. That explanation fits the timeline. It also leaves out the substantive objections from the financial industry.
SIFMA, the trade group representing major financial firms, argued that sweeping market-structure changes belong in formal rulemaking, not exemptions. “These types of significant structural changes should be considered and made through an open and transparent process,” the group wrote in a June 30 letter to the SEC. Its concerns zeroed in on how blockchain-based trading venues would slot into existing equity-market rules, particularly brokers’ best-execution obligations under Regulation NMS.
The exemption would have lowered regulatory barriers for firms looking to issue and trade tokenized securities on blockchain rails under existing securities laws. It was never slated for formal notice-and-comment rulemaking. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in May she did not expect it to cover synthetic tokens, telling CoinDesk the exemption would allow tokens that “would facilitate trading only of digital representations of the same underlying equity security that an investor could purchase.”
The SEC had seemed ready to release the exemption in May 2026 after repeatedly pushing back its own deadline. It did not. That part is not new.
In June, the commission separately proposed rescinding Rule 611 of Regulation NMS, the Order Protection Rule, a move the industry read as clearing an obstacle for trading tokenized securities. The broader picture: Nasdaq and NYSE have both unveiled tokenized-securities infrastructure, and the DTCC processed its first live production trades with tokenized securities in July as part of a test phase. Citi has projected tokenized assets could become a $5.5 trillion market by 2030.
Meanwhile, the legislative path the SEC had hoped to complement is narrowing. The Clarity Act’s Senate prospects are “hanging by a thread” when the chamber briefly returns next month, CoinDesk reported. Whether negotiations among lawmakers and the White House can find enough common ground to clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate remains an open question.
That regulatory gap is not going unaddressed elsewhere. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will hold an Innovation Advisory Committee meeting Aug. 20 to address crypto assets, artificial intelligence, and prediction markets, Cointelegraph reported, a step toward filling the vacuum left by the stalled Clarity Act.
What the SEC has not said is when the Reg Crypto meeting will be rescheduled, whether the innovation exemption now waits on the Clarity Act’s fate, or which specific concerns won out. SIFMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An SEC spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions.
