Trump hosts crypto executives as the SEC proposes its friendliest rules yet

The Securities and Exchange Commission spent Tuesday proposing the friendliest set of crypto rules an American regulator has ever put on paper. On Wednesday, the industry that would benefit from them was at the White House, having lunch with the president.

Donald Trump hosted crypto executives and trade body officials in Washington alongside Paul Atkins, who chairs the SEC, Mike Selig of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Patrick Witt, the administration’s crypto adviser.

It is a guest list that would raise eyebrows in a normal week, and this was not one, given that Trump has reported roughly $1.4bn in crypto income from his family’s ventures.

The proposal on the table is called Regulation Crypto Assets, and it does something the sector has wanted for the better part of a decade. It creates two registration exemptions: one covering a single offering of up to $5m over four years, and a larger one allowing up to $75m in any 12-month period, both based on narrative disclosures rather than the full securities regime.

The more consequential piece is a conditional safe harbour. Under the SEC’s own description, a token could fall outside the definition of an investment contract entirely once its issuer has finished or permanently abandoned the managerial work it promised investors, which is the point at which the agency considers the asset to have stopped being a bet on a founder.