In brief

• SEC Chair Paul Atkins launched a new podcast with Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda, outlining a pro-innovation crypto regulatory agenda.
• The agency has dropped over a dozen crypto enforcement cases since Trump's return to office, with actions falling 22% in fiscal year 2025.
• Experts say clear rules could unlock institutional adoption, but timing remains critical.

The SEC's sweeping regulatory pivot under Chair Paul Atkins is sending the clearest signal yet that America's top securities regulator has chosen cooperation over confrontation with the crypto industry—but whether words translate into durable policy remains the central question for markets, according to experts.

In the inaugural episode of Material Matters, Atkins’ first official podcast, the SEC Chair projected a pro-innovation message, saying the U.S. should be the place “where people want to innovate, whether it’s in crypto or something else,” and hailing a “very important inflection point in American markets.”

The first episode, released Thursday, featured Commissioners Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce and was billed by the agency as a window into its 2026 priorities.

"In the last four years, it was a complete deviation," Uyeda said of the Gensler-era SEC, noting the agency had strayed from its core mandate into areas including DEI oversight, greenhouse gas disclosures, and supply chain management.

"We weren't even in the stadium. We were outside,” he said.

Peirce, who leads the agency's crypto task force, now rebranded as Project Crypto, used the platform to lay out her case for innovation-first regulation.

"We need to have financial regulation that is open to innovators because innovation is what makes the financial markets resilient," she said. "If we can encourage people to build here, our investors will benefit. Our markets will benefit."

A new regime

The U.S. SEC under Paul Atkins has rolled out a series of crypto policy shifts, including guidance that “most crypto assets” are not securities, exemptions for DeFi interfaces, and the closure or dismissal of cases against crypto firms like Ripple, Coinbase, Binance, and others.

Enforcement actions fell 22% in fiscal 2025, monetary relief dropped to $2.7 billion from $8.2 billion, with the agency saying last week that crypto enforcement in prior years “l(fā)ed to misguided expectations.”

Democratic lawmakers have criticized the SEC’s enforcement rollback, with Rep. Stephen Lynch saying at a House Financial Services Committee hearing that the SEC's dismissal of high-profile cases has eroded investor trust.

Male Zane, regional manager at crypto exchange CoinEx, said the shift marks a structural change in how the regulator engages with markets.

"Paul Atkins's first speech in his new role signals a shift from a confrontational regulatory model to a systemic and predictable rule architecture," Zane told Decrypt. "In practical terms, this signals a gradual return of institutional capital, the normalization of listings, and the launch of more complex products, from derivatives to new ETFs."

Zane cautioned, however, that the market "remains cautious due to the dependence of further steps on legislative initiatives in the US Congress."

"Rules come first. You can't build infrastructure on ambiguity," Sergey Kravtsov, co-founder and CEO of stablecoinpayment protocol Papaya Finance, told Decrypt, adding that he is relocating his company to the U.S. and filing a patent with the USPTO on the back of the current administration's posture.

"But if the framework takes two more years, the infrastructure layer gets built in Singapore, UAE, or the EU under MiCA," Kravtsov warned. "The window where the U.S. can attract the foundational layer—not just trading apps but actual payment infrastructure—is probably 12–18 months."

Kravtsov argued that first signs of such a shift would be felt at the infrastructure layer, not in token launches.

Clear rules would enable “payment companies, neobanks, and fintech platforms” to integrate crypto rails without fear of enforcement, compressing timelines from “exploring” to “shipping,” he said.

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