Atkins opened his SEC tenure by questioning crypto custody rules

Paul Atkins used his first public appearance as chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, 2025 to place crypto-asset custody near the center of his regulatory agenda. Opening the SEC Crypto Task Force’s third roundtable, Atkins said existing rules might need changes to accommodate digital assets and blockchain technology and questioned whether the agency’s special-purpose broker-dealer regime was workable.

The appearance was an institutional signal, not a policy enactment. The SEC adopted no rule, exemption or binding interpretation on April 25. Atkins nevertheless made the change in direction explicit: on his fourth day back at the agency, he said market participants deserved clear rules and called for a rational, fit-for-purpose framework developed with the administration and Congress. Contemporaneous CoinDesk reporting identified the session as his first public event as chairman.

Custody as market infrastructure

The roundtable examined how broker-dealers, investment advisers and investment companies could hold crypto assets while complying with federal securities laws. Atkins asked whether custody rules under the Exchange Act, Advisers Act and Investment Company Act needed revision and whether a different broker-dealer framework was required.

Those questions mattered beyond asset safekeeping. Commissioner Hester Peirce argued that a broker or alternative trading system unable to custody or otherwise handle an asset would struggle to facilitate trading in it. She also said uncertainty over which tokens were securities, which entities qualified as custodians and whether staking or voting created custody violations could constrain advisers and investment companies. Her remarks supported self-custody as an option the regulatory framework should not automatically displace.

Commissioners exposed the policy divide

Commissioner Mark Uyeda said the SEC’s January 23, 2025 withdrawal of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 had removed a significant accounting obstacle for companies offering crypto custody, but had not resolved the wider framework. He proposed considering state-chartered limited-purpose trust companies as qualified custodians, modifying or ending the special-purpose broker-dealer regime, and issuing interim guidance covering security and non-security crypto assets.

Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw supplied the principal caution. She described existing custody requirements as an important investor-protection standard and asked how an alternative crypto regime would address hacking, smart-contract failures, insolvency, omnibus wallets and the possible absence of Securities Investor Protection Corporation safeguards. Her remarks showed that the Commission had not reached consensus on whether broader custody options would preserve equivalent protections.

What changed—and what did not

The verified April 25 development was therefore an agenda-setting shift. The new chairman publicly accepted that existing custody architecture might not fit blockchain assets and indicated that the SEC had room to examine changes while Congress considered wider market-structure legislation. Industry participants gained evidence that custody restrictions, rather than enforcement alone, would receive direct attention from the agency’s leadership.

But the legal position remained unchanged at the close of the roundtable. Atkins did not specify a timetable, proposed text or Commission vote. The treatment of state trust companies, adviser self-custody, non-security assets and special-purpose broker-dealers remained open. The event’s importance lay in identifying the questions that could determine whether regulated institutions could offer digital-asset services—not in answering them on April 25, 2025.