White House Gets Two Crypto Rule Deliveries in One Week — Neither Wrapped in a Bow 📦

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sent its proposed "Amendments to the Custody Rules" to the White House Office of Management and Budget on August 25 for review, a public filing on reginfo.gov shows, setting up potential changes to how investment advisers and investment companies hold client crypto assets under the Investment Advisers Act and Investment Company Act. The OMB record carries two labels that signal the direction: "economically significant," denoting at least $100 million in yearly economic impact, and a designation under Executive Order 14192, signed by President Donald Trump in January 2025, which directs agencies to scrap ten rules for every new one they write. The SEC's regulatory agenda abstract names crypto assets directly and targets a formal proposal for October, a step that would open a public comment period.

The current framework requires advisers to park client assets with a qualified custodian, typically a bank or broker-dealer, institutions that have largely declined to hold crypto, leaving advisers with limited compliant options. Former Chair Gary Gensler's 2023 Safeguarding Rule would have widened custody duties, and SEC staff probed advisers over custody practices; the agency withdrew that plan in June 2025. Since then, industry voices have weighed in: venture firm Andreessen Horowitz asked the SEC to modernize crypto custody rules, and in December 2025 lawyers from Delphi Ventures and Multicoin Capital sent the agency a custody framework that asks for room to use multi-signature and multi-party computation (MPC) wallets, which split key control so no single party can move the assets. The proposal has not yet been made public, and OMB can request changes before sending it back to the SEC for a vote on whether to release it for public comment.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, who took the chair in 2025, has pledged to move away from the agency's previous "regulation through enforcement" approach and develop rules through formal rulemaking. "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 … clear pathways to raise capital under the federal securities laws," Atkins said in an August 18 statement, referring to a separate token fundraising proposal the SEC filed one week before the custody submission. The SEC dismissed several cases against major crypto companies in 2025, including its lawsuit against Coinbase, as part of the broader reset.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission followed with its own submission, sending a proposal titled "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets" to OMB after the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act. Details of the CFTC proposal were not disclosed, and it remains unclear which crypto assets it covers, what exchanges would need to do to qualify, what restrictions would apply, or how far the CFTC believes its authority extends. The House passed the Clarity Act 294-134 in July 2025, a bill that would split crypto oversight between the SEC and the CFTC, but the measure has sat in the Senate since and now faces a 60-vote cloture test around September 15, with passage odds remaining shaky.

CFTC Chair Mike Selig signaled the agency would proceed regardless. "The CFTC is locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance," Selig wrote on X after the Wednesday vote. The CFTC also published a no-action letter giving certain passive software providers, including some crypto wallet interfaces, a way to connect users to regulated derivatives markets without registering as introducing brokers; the relief covers software that lets users view markets and submit orders directly to registered firms, permits providers to market specific contracts and receive transaction-based fees, but bars them from holding customer assets, generating buy or sell signals, or controlling how orders are routed or executed. The no-action position remains in place until the CFTC adopts rules or guidance addressing registration requirements for software developers.

Separately on Thursday, the SEC issued an "innovation exemption" that gives qualifying platforms a five-year path to offer onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks without registering as securities exchanges. Both agencies have said they will continue coordinating on digital-asset rules under their existing authority while Congress remains stalled on the Clarity Act, with each proposal requiring further votes at the CFTC and SEC before any of the measures can take effect.