Atkins mapped the SEC’s push toward on-chain markets

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins used a September 10, 2025 address in Paris to give the agency’s crypto-policy turn its clearest international framing yet. Atkins said Project Crypto would modernize securities rules so U.S. markets could move on-chain, asserted that most crypto tokens were not securities, and called for clearer asset-status lines, on-chain capital raising and platforms able to combine trading, lending and staking under one regulatory umbrella.

The address mattered because it joined token classification, custody, market venues and blockchain settlement in a single policy vision from the head of the principal U.S. securities regulator. It also signaled a sharp change in enforcement philosophy: Atkins said policy would no longer be made through ad hoc enforcement actions.

The legal limit was equally important. Atkins expressly said the views were his own, not necessarily those of the Commission or its other commissioners. The speech adopted no rule, granted no exemption, approved no product and did not determine the status of any named token or transaction.

What Atkins put under Project Crypto

Atkins described Project Crypto as the SEC’s response to the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets report issued on July 30, 2025. He listed several priorities: certainty about when crypto assets are securities; a path for entrepreneurs to raise capital on-chain; “super-app” platforms offering multiple services; and freedom for investors, advisers and broker-dealers to choose among custody arrangements.

He also said the SEC would coordinate with other agencies so a platform could offer trading in crypto assets, whether or not those assets were securities, alongside staking and lending. That formulation addressed a persistent market-structure problem: a single crypto venue could touch securities law, commodities regulation, custody requirements and lending rules at the same time.

Still, “under a single regulatory umbrella” described an objective, not an operating license. On September 10 no filing path, eligibility test, capital standard or customer-protection package was attached to the concept. Market participants could read the speech as a direction of travel, but not as permission to disregard existing registration or compliance obligations.

The transatlantic setting mattered

The speech opened the inaugural OECD Roundtable on Global Financial Markets at 14:00 Central European Summer Time in Paris. The OECD’s program placed digital innovation inside a wider discussion of capital-market competitiveness, and a later session examined whether artificial intelligence and distributed-ledger technology could make markets more competitive.

Atkins praised the European Union for moving early with its Markets in Crypto-Assets framework and said the United States should learn from that effort. He also called public blockchains inherently global and presented regulatory cooperation as necessary to modernize payments and capital markets. The institutional message was not simply that Washington wanted a more permissive domestic regime; it was that U.S. rulemaking would compete and interact with established overseas frameworks.

Signal, not settled law

Contemporaneous coverage focused on Atkins’s statement that most tokens were not securities and on his support for combined trading, lending and staking services. Those propositions were consequential because security status determines disclosure, registration and venue obligations. But a chair’s broad categorization cannot replace a facts-and-circumstances legal analysis or a Commission action.

The address also supplied no market dataset. This reconstruction therefore makes no claim that Bitcoin, Ether or another instrument moved because of it. No price interval, return, volume, liquidation or fund-flow calculation can be responsibly attributed to the speech from the cited records.

What was knowable on September 10, 2025 was narrower and still significant: the SEC chair publicly tied Project Crypto to on-chain securities markets, multi-service platforms, flexible custody and interagency coordination, while acknowledging that Congress was drafting comprehensive legislation. The implementation questions—definitions, safeguards, formal rulemaking and the boundary between the SEC and other regulators—remained unresolved.