New crypto regulations likely to be big favor to the Trump family, industry insiders say

[groundloop]

Source: The Guardian

On Tuesday, major US financial regulators published rules for the cryptocurrency industry that may reduce regulatory requirements and that insiders believe will benefit the Trump family’s ventures.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued new guidelines for the cryptocurrency industry to answer the longstanding question of what does or does not qualify as a security, a classification that entails strict oversight. SEC chair, Paul Atkins, has dubbed the framework a “token taxonomy” for the sector. Published jointly with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the guidelines classify most of crypto-based assets as commodities, collectibles, payment tokens or “digital tools”, exempting them from the SEC’s more stringent oversight and disclosure requirements. Only blockchain-based representations of existing securities, such as stocks and bonds, remain classified as securities under this new framework.

Interviews with legal experts, lobbyists and crypto entrepreneurs suggest that these new rules may meaningfully lessen much of the crypto sector’s existing regulatory and disclosure requirements, and may spur additional institutional financial interest in crypto-based activities – market shifts that may be a boon to the Trump family’s various crypto projects.

“This latest interpretation is in line with other actions taken by the Trump administration to facilitate the continued expansion of profit-making but socially valueless crypto issuance and trading activity free from most federal regulation,” said Todd Baker, a senior fellow at Columbia business school and Columbia law school.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/22/sec-crypto-regulations-trump-family

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. Just remember, 16 Dem senators voted Yes on this bill

Gallego has taken around $10 million from crypto PACs.

Wonder how much the other 15 got?

[snot]

2. This actually sounds appropriate to me.

I haven't read the regulations, so there's that caveat; but whether you consider crypto a store of value or a currency or both, it does not represent an investment in a company that has profits, losses, employees, or assets or that sells goods or services. I'm not sure how you'd even apply SEC disclosure requirements to it.

Just because there's a market for crypto and its sale can be subject to or used in fraud doesn't make it a "security" any more than, say, stamps or beanie babies.

Imho, the only reason the government delayed this decision for so long was that they feared the potential of crypto to expose the weakness of the dollar – a weakness created not by crypto but by decades of governmental recklessness and Treasury & Fed shenanigans.