Peirce Leaves the SEC With the Comment Period Still Open – and the Framework’s Future in Two People’s Hands

Hester Peirce posted “T minus 7” on X on September 25, 2026 – a photograph of her resignation letter addressed to President Trump, seven days before she would walk out of the Securities and Exchange Commission for the last time. The commissioner who led the SEC Crypto Task Force since early 2025 was signaling the end of something more specific than a career: the end of a single, identifiable architect’s custody of the agency’s most ambitious regulatory experiment.

The experiment is called Regulation Crypto Assets, a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking released on August 18, 2026, that attempts to codify a path forward for digital assets that have spent years stuck in the gap between securities law and functional currency. The NPRM proposes two offering exemptions – a $5 million startup window and a $75 million ongoing exemption modeled on Regulation A – alongside a conditional safe harbor from the Howey test. The safe harbor relies on a self-certification mechanism: an issuer declares that a covered investment contract has “ceased to exist,” and the underlying crypto asset is deemed outside the securities definition. It is a clever, if legally precarious, attempt to provide regulatory certainty where the courts have mostly provided litigation.