Republican leaders of the U.S. House Financial Services and Agriculture committees released a 212-page digital-asset market-structure discussion draft on May 5, 2025, proposing a federal framework for token issuance, secondary trading, exchange registration and the division of authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The release was consequential because it addressed one of the cryptocurrency industry’s central legal uncertainties: when a blockchain-based asset or transaction falls under securities law and when trading in a qualifying digital commodity should be supervised through a commodities framework. It was also preliminary. The document still carried a placeholder short title, had not been formally introduced with a bill number and had received no House or Senate vote.
House Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, Financial Services Chairman French Hill and digital-asset subcommittee chairmen Dusty Johnson and Bryan Steil released the draft. Their committees scheduled a joint hearing for May 6, making the text a starting point for congressional debate rather than a completed legislative agreement.
A proposed SEC-CFTC division
The draft would give the CFTC exclusive regulatory jurisdiction over cash or spot digital-commodity transactions conducted through new categories of registered digital-commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers. The agency already possessed anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority over commodity spot markets, but the proposal contemplated direct supervision of specified intermediaries, including registration, capital, recordkeeping, surveillance, conflicts and customer-asset requirements.
Digital-commodity exchanges would have to segregate customer funds, use qualified custodians when holding those funds and publish information concerning listed assets. The proposal would also treat certain exchanges, brokers and dealers as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. These provisions showed that classifying an asset outside the securities framework would not leave its organized trading entirely unregulated.
For the SEC, the draft proposed separating a digital commodity from an investment contract through which it might be sold. It would create a conditional securities-law exemption for certain issuer capital raises, require disclosures and restrict sales by related or affiliated persons. It also proposed that qualifying secondary-market digital-commodity transactions conveying no rights in an issuer or other business would not themselves be treated as investment contracts.
The maturity test and decentralized networks
A central mechanism allowed an issuer or related party to certify to the SEC that a blockchain system was “mature,” meaning it was not controlled by a person or group under common control. The SEC could examine the certification, while issuers and insiders would remain subject to disclosures and transaction restrictions specified by the proposal.
That approach attempted to create a legal transition between an early network developed by an identifiable group and a sufficiently decentralized system. Whether the definitions would work consistently across different governance structures remained uncertain. Control can involve software administration, token ownership, validator concentration, treasury authority or informal coordination, and the draft’s release did not establish how regulators would resolve every borderline case.
The text also excluded specified decentralized-finance activities from certain SEC and CFTC registration provisions. Listed activities included validating transactions, publishing software, developing wallets and providing some user interfaces. The exclusions did not remove anti-fraud or anti-manipulation authority, and they were not a universal exemption for every product described as decentralized.
What changed on May 5—and what did not
The verified development was the publication of a detailed congressional proposal backed by the Republican chairs of both House committees responsible for securities and commodity-market legislation. It supplied concrete language for registration, custody, token fundraising, secondary trading and agency jurisdiction.
It changed no legal obligation on May 5, 2025. No token became a digital commodity because of the release, no platform obtained federal registration and neither regulator received new statutory authority. The draft contemplated extensive rulemaking—including a general 360-day deadline after any enactment—so even passage in substantially similar form would not have produced an instant operating regime.
No cryptocurrency price, percentage return, trading-volume or on-chain claim is included because the congressional records do not establish an attributable market reaction. The event’s significance was institutional: lawmakers had placed a comprehensive SEC-CFTC framework into public debate, while its language, political support and prospects remained unresolved on May 5.
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