SEC puts crypto-offering rules on federal regulatory agenda

On September 4, 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission placed a new “Crypto Assets” rulemaking entry on the federal government’s Spring 2025 Unified Agenda, marking a formal planning step toward rules for token offerings and sales. The entry, RIN 3235-AN38, said the agency’s Division of Corporation Finance was considering recommending that the Commission propose rules that could include exemptions and safe harbors.

The development mattered because it moved the SEC’s crypto policy program from speeches and roundtables into the government’s published rulemaking pipeline. It did not, however, adopt a rule, approve any token sale or create an exemption that a market participant could use on September 4.

A documented rulemaking marker

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs record classified the item as economically significant and “major,” listed it for the first time in the Unified Agenda, and placed it at the proposed-rule stage. The timetable showed an April 2026 target for a notice of proposed rulemaking. That date was an agency planning estimate, not a statutory deadline or a promise that the Commission would act then.

The record was unusually preliminary in other respects. It listed the relevant Code of Federal Regulations citation and legal authority as not yet determined, and it said there was no legal deadline. It also anticipated a regulatory-flexibility analysis and identified businesses as the small entities potentially affected. Those fields underscored both the potential breadth of the project and how much legal and economic work remained before any operative text could emerge.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described the agenda more broadly on September 4. He said clear rules for the issuance, custody and trading of crypto assets were a priority, while the specific agenda entry focused more narrowly on the offer and sale of crypto assets. That distinction is important: the chairman’s policy statement supplied direction, but the government entry defined the documented project then in the pipeline.

Why the institutional context mattered

The agenda arrived two days after SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission staff issued a joint statement saying SEC- and CFTC-registered exchanges were not prohibited from facilitating certain spot crypto-commodity products. Taken together, the September 2 and September 4 records showed regulators pursuing both near-term staff coordination and longer-horizon Commission rulemaking.

For issuers and intermediaries, an exemptions or safe-harbor proposal could eventually address a central structural problem: whether and how a project may distribute a crypto asset while a network is being developed, without treating every later transfer as legally identical to the original capital-raising transaction. The agenda did not answer that question. It established that the SEC was considering a proposal designed to clarify the framework.

The entry also mattered for institutional planning. Exchanges, broker-dealers, custodians, venture investors and token developers make compliance and product decisions years in advance. A published agenda can reveal the agency’s priorities and likely sequence of work, even though firms cannot rely on it as law. Axios’s September 4 crypto newsletter contemporaneously identified the new listing as the latest SEC policy step, confirming that the item was visible to market observers on the event date.

What the record did not establish

No Commission vote, proposed text, comment period or effective date accompanied the September 4 listing. The agenda did not declare which crypto assets were securities, resolve the line between securities and commodities, pre-empt Congress or displace existing statutes and court decisions. “Potentially” including exemptions and safe harbors was an expression of scope under consideration, not a commitment to their final form.

The same caution applies to the April 2026 timetable. Unified Agenda dates can change, and later rulemaking cannot be projected backward as though its language or outcome were knowable on September 4, 2025. The verifiable event-day conclusion is narrower but consequential: the SEC formally recorded crypto-offering rules as an economically significant proposed-rule project, giving the industry a concrete regulatory waypoint without yet changing anyone’s legal obligations.