USA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Dario de Martino and Susan Gault-Brown, A&O Shearman
Introduction: From Promise to Delivery The United States has long been a leading centre for technological innovation. For much of the preceding decade, however, strong legal and regulatory head- winds created substantial challenges for digital asset companies wishing to do business there. By main- taining an adversarial posture towards the industry, the United States put at risk its opportunity to lead in the development of innumerable businesses utilis- ing blockchain technology, and put itself out of step with major markets that had already enacted laws designed to balance the potential of these technolo- gies against market and consumer protections. That posture is in the process of being dismantled. By the middle of 2026, the shift from adversarial enforce- ment to a constructive framework has moved from rhetoric to implementation, through executive action, agency guidance and federal statute. In July 2025, the President signed the GENIUS Act, the first compre- hensive federal crypto law, governing payment sta- blecoins. In March 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), with the concurrence of the Com- modity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), issued interpretative guidance on how the federal securities laws apply to certain crypto-assets. Comprehensive market structure legislation has passed the House of Representatives and, in May 2026, cleared the Senate Banking Committee. Taken together, these moves signal a materially more permissive US posture towards digital asset business- es than the one that prevailed through most of the prior administration. Much of the potential energy that lay dormant during the prolonged period of regulatory scrutiny is being released. The questions that remain are less about whether a federal framework will arrive than about how its final pieces will be assembled, and how durable they will prove. A New Securities Regulatory Environment The digital assets industry battled various US govern- mental agencies for years, but its chief antagonist was the SEC. The Commission’s general approach had been to rebuff the sector’s calls for regulatory clarity, instead testing novel legal theories through the courts. This “regulation by enforcement” posture drew sharp criticism from senior SEC personnel – most notably
Commissioner Hester Peirce – and, at times, from the judiciary. On 21 January 2025, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, then-Acting Chairman Mark T Uyeda announced the launch of a Crypto Task Force, led by Commissioner Peirce, dedicated to developing a comprehensive regulatory framework. The SEC’s release acknowledged that the Commission had relied “primarily on enforcement actions to regulate crypto retroactively and reactively”, which had produced “confusion about what is legal, which creates an envi- ronment hostile to innovation and conducive to fraud”. On 21 February 2025, Commissioner Peirce issued a request for public input titled “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here”, posing 48 questions spanning reg- istration, trading, public offerings, custody and digital asset lending. The Task Force then held a series of public roundtables addressing security status, trad- ing, custody, tokenisation and decentralised finance. Paul Atkins, confirmed as SEC Chairman in April 2025, gave that effort a permanent leader and a wider remit. On 31 July 2025, Chairman Atkins delivered remarks unveiling “Project Crypto”, a Commission-wide initia- tive to modernise the securities rules for on-chain mar- kets. Through 2025, the staff of the Division of Corpo- ration Finance issued statements taking the position that transactions in typical “meme coins”, and in fully reserved dollar-backed stablecoins redeemable one- for-one, do not involve the offer and sale of securities; the stablecoin statement expressly reserved judge- ment on yield-bearing products. Project Crypto was framed as the vehicle for converting those staff posi- tions into rules. On 17 March 2026, the SEC issued interpretative guidance (which the CFTC joined for purposes of administering the Commodity Exchange Act) clarify- ing how the federal securities laws apply to certain crypto-assets and transactions. The guidance set out a taxonomy of digital commodities, digital col- lectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securi- ties, and addressed when a non-security crypto-asset may be sold as part of an investment contract and when that status may cease. It also addressed the treatment of activities such as protocol staking. The SEC’s interpretation narrows, or at least clarifies, the
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