regulation
SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets comment window closes with 2 of 5 commissioners seated
File S7-2026-27 drew comments from Hyperliquid Policy Center, Bitwise, Chainalysis and The Digital Chamber. The two sitting commissioners alone review the record after Peirce's October 2 departure.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission closed the comment window on its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets rulemaking on Tuesday, October 20. The 60-day docket, filed as S7-2026-27 (releases 33-11434 and 34-106150), sits on the SEC's own public-comments page. Only two of five commissioner seats are currently filled — Chairman Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda — so the review of the record runs through them alone.
What the proposal does
The rulemaking, published in the Federal Register on August 21 as document 2026-17183, carves two exemption lanes out of Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 and layers in a conditional "investment contract" safe harbor:
- A startup exemption of up to $5 million aggregated across a four-year period.
- A fundraising exemption of up to $75 million in each 12-month period.
- A conditional safe harbor removing certain crypto investment contracts from the "security" definition under the 1933 and 1934 Acts.
The proposal is not final law. Per Phemex Academy's deadline writeup, eighteen letters sat on the docket before the window opened; the running count is maintained on regulations.gov.
Who filed
The SEC's own comment index names the first-page cohort directly. From the public-comments page, the submitters include:
- Hyperliquid Policy Center — Brad Bourque and Jake Chervinsky
- Bitwise Asset Management — Johanna Collins-Wood, General Counsel
- Chainalysis Inc.
- AIMA (Alternative Investment Management Association) — Jiří Król
- GLEIF — Alexandre Kech, CEO (two submissions)
- Aleo Network Foundation — Yaya J. Fanusie
- The Digital Chamber — recorded via a Division of Corporation Finance meeting memo dated August 19
- Take-Two Interactive Software — filing for Rockstar Games
- An academic submission from Lee Reiners of the Duke Financial Economics Center with former SEC staffer John Reed Stark
A pattern: industry groups and large on-chain analytics vendors on one side, a Duke / former-staff pairing on the other. The SEC page shows letters dated October 16 to October 19 in its most recent entries.
Who votes on it
Three vacancies on the five-seat Commission shaped the stretch run of the docket:
- Jaime Lizárraga left in January 2025.
- Caroline Crenshaw left in January 2026.
- Hester Peirce left on October 2, 2026. No nominee has been sent to the Senate.
On September 30, two days before Peirce's departure, the SEC changed its quorum rule without a public consultation: a single commissioner now suffices to act on a matter where another recuses, replacing the three-commissioner floor set in 1995.
What to watch
- The final-rule timing. Atkins and Uyeda now sit on the record alone until a third commissioner is confirmed; a two-person Commission is the only one that could vote the rule out as it stands.
- The safe-harbor scope. The industry comment letters above push for a broader "non-security" perimeter; the Duke / Stark submission argues the opposite direction. The reconciliation of those two camps is the live editorial choice in the final text.
- Any CLARITY Act revival. The Senate failed a cloture motion on CLARITY on September 15, 49–50 — well short of the 60 required. Senator Cynthia Lummis publicly conceded the bill was finished. If the SEC rulemaking stalls, Congress is not a near-term backstop.
Context
Regulation Crypto Assets is the SEC's attempt to replace the enforcement-driven posture of 2022–2024 with a written rulebook. It is also the first major crypto rulemaking in years to go to a formal notice-and-comment period rather than a staff bulletin — meaning the comment letters above will show up in the administrative record that any post-adoption challenge is litigated against.
This desk covered the related Blockchain Association filing on Treasury's GENIUS Act Section 3 docket in the morning run; that rulemaking lands on top of whatever the SEC ships out of S7-2026-27. The two regulators are, for the first time, running parallel comment-period workstreams on the same payment-stablecoin / crypto-asset perimeter.