SEC Shelved Crypto Fundraising Rulemaking After Wall Street Group Weighed Legal Challenge: Report

The SEC blamed a scheduling problem, but sources point to a SIFMA litigation threat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission abruptly canceled an open meeting Friday that would have started the formal rulemaking process for Regulation Crypto Assets, a new framework governing how crypto projects raise money in the United States. The meeting had been announced only days earlier and was read across Washington as the agency moving on its own while the industry’s market structure bill sits stalled.

An SEC spokesperson attributed the cancellation to an “unforeseen scheduling issue” and offered no further detail. Multiple industry sources told Crypto in America that the White House had asked the agency to postpone, worried that Reg Crypto Assets and, separately, an innovation exemption the SEC’s Crypto Task Force has been building would complicate Clarity Act negotiations before the Senate’s procedural vote.

This story is an excerpt from the Unchained Daily newsletter.

That call, however, may have been influenced by the threat of litigation from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Decrypt reported Monday, citing two sources familiar with the matter. The Wall Street trade group discussed the possibility of legal action if it concluded the SEC had exceeded its statutory authority under federal securities laws, including through exemptions or no-action relief, according to the report. That prospect may have fed the White House’s decision to have the agency stand down, the sources reportedly told Decrypt.

SIFMA, which represents many of Wall Street’s largest broker-dealers, investment banks and asset managers, argued in a June 2025 letter that the SEC should not rewrite the rules for tokenized securities through no-action letters or exemptions, warning of regulatory arbitrage, weaker investor protections and fragmented liquidity. Unlike the fundraising proposal, the innovation exemption would rest on the SEC’s existing exemptive authority rather than formal rulemaking, which is precisely the mechanism SIFMA has been targeting.

Whether the SEC reschedules before the Senate returns is unclear. In the meantime, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig are expected at a White House event Wednesday alongside executives from crypto, prediction markets and traditional finance, with President Trump delivering remarks. Selig hosts the first meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee on Thursday, chaired by Futures Industry Association head Walt Lukken. The Clarity Act cloture vote is scheduled for the afternoon of Sept. 15, with DeFi and developer protections, Senate Agriculture provisions and ethics rules still unresolved. The bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote in May, and conflict-of-interest questions have trailed it since.

Related Listen: Kristin Smith on Why the Clarity Act Comes Down to a Memecoin