SEC Rulemaking Is Giving Corporate Finance a New Crypto Hurdle Rate

Cryptocurrency’s biggest enterprise problem isn’t its volatility and unpredictable returns. It’s that the risk of digital assets, spanning both the balance sheet and the compliance and regulatory arena, is difficult to calculate.

Chief financial officers have historically been forced to answer, mostly by themselves, questions like what exactly was the asset? Was it itself a security, or was its sale part of an investment contract? Could that status change? What obligations traveled with it? How much regulatory risk needed to be layered on top of the market, custody, liquidity and operational risks a treasury department already had to consider?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is now trying to make some of those questions easier to answer with its “Regulation Crypto Assets” initiative, updated Tuesday (Aug. 18).

“As we continue the commission’s efforts to provide clarity for crypto markets, and as Congress works to establish a lasting regulatory framework, Regulation Crypto Assets seeks to provide crypto asset entrepreneurs and market participants with clear pathways to raise capital under the federal securities laws,” SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins said in a statement.

For corporate finance, the important development is that crypto’s regulatory risk is beginning to look less like an unknowable and more like something that can potentially be put into a spreadsheet.