Crypto builders are celebrating fresh clarity from America’s top financial markets regulator.
The Securities and Exchange Commission used to be “a hammer, and everything related to digital assets was a nail,” Rich Shorten, founder of staking platform GlobalStake, told DL News.
But the no-action decision issued on September 29 for the decentralised crypto project DoubleZero “is a flashing green light” that the SEC has begun to “actually engage in the details — and that’s a very, very positive thing.”
For years, crypto firms have complained that US regulators treated every token as a potential security.
To those celebrating the agency’s no action note, it sets a precedent that some tokens can operate outside securities law, giving builders the confidence to expand in the US without fear of regulatory whiplash, and eases the integration of digital assets into mainstream finance.
It also signals that the SEC under President Donald Trump’s administration is “open for business,” Shorten said.
The decisive move marks a sharp break from the previous era when crypto teams faced only “delay and silence, at best, or enforcement action, at worst.”
To be sure, Amanda Fischer, the former SEC chief of staff, noted that the regulator issued a no-action letter to blockchain gaming platform Pocketful of Quarters “years ago.”
Even so, the new letter is more “about the signal it sends that projects and investors can expect the SEC to actually engage with the fine details of digital assets, just as they do in countless other non-digital contexts,” Shorten said.
In the decision on DoubleZero, Commissioner Hester Peirce argued that tokens used to reward participants for providing storage, bandwidth, or other services don’t fit the definition of securities.
The decision focused on DePIN projects, which reward people for providing real-world services like storage or bandwidth. Tokens distributed as compensation for those services don’t fall under the agency’s criteria as investment contracts, the SEC said.
“These tokens are neither shares of stock in a company, nor promises of profits from the managerial efforts of others,” Peirce wrote. “They are functional incentives designed to encourage infrastructure buildout.”
“Blockchain technology cannot reach its full potential if we force all activities into existing financial market regulatory frameworks,” Peirce said.
The new clarity “will accelerate the growth of networks that deliver measurable value” for the DePIN sector which could grow from $30-50 billion today to $3.5 trillion by 2028, Arie Trouw, co-founder and CEO of blockchain company XY Labs, told DL News.
