Binance lawsuit: paused. Coinbase lawsuit: dismissed. Investigations into OpenSea, Robinhood, and Uniswap? Done, done, and dusted.
Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump’s SEC has effectively ripped apart its crypto caseload, dismantling the agency’s concerted, years-long campaign to halt the core businesses of all manner of blockchain-related companies.
The development, naturally, has spread euphoria across the digital assets industry after years of costly legal battles that threatened to push top exchanges out of business.
But should the crypto industry be celebrating total victory just yet? Legal experts who spoke to Decrypt cautioned it may be a tad early to break out the champagne. While recently dismissed lawsuits indicate crypto’s secondary marketplaces are likely now in the clear, the SEC has not yet weighed in on the legal statuses of the thousands of tokens that populate those exchanges—and some may well remain in the agency’s crosshairs.
“In terms of individual tokens themselves, they have not made any substantive decisions.”
Arie Heijkoop, an attorney at Haynes Boone specializing in securities regulation, told Decrypt. “Some of them, I think, are going to be deemed to be securities.”
Last week, SEC commissioner Hester Peirce—the head of the agency’s new crypto task force—proposed a taxonomy that would see digital assets sorted into four general categories. Two of those classifications would label tokens as unregistered securities, if they either “possess[ed] the intrinsic characteristics of securities,” or, lacking such qualities, were still “offered and sold as part of an investment contract.”
Even though Trump’s SEC has shown itself to be remarkably pro-crypto so far, Heijkoop contends that the agency will ultimately classify crypto tokens as securities if they were ever marketed as assets that would appreciate thanks to the efforts of issuers.
“If I was a betting man, would I say they’re going to decide that anything crypto is not a security?” the attorney mused. “No.”
Should crypto users then get concerned all over again about the legal status of altcoin mainstays like Solana, Polygon, and Cardano, which the SEC previously alleged were securities?
Ryne Miller, co-chair of Lowenstein Sandler’s crypto practice, is confident the current SEC won’t pull any fast ones when it comes to established tokens.
“I'm not worried about token sales that have already happened,” Miller told Decrypt. “Particularly in the context of token environments that are very robust, where the tokens are clearly usable for what they were designed to be used for,” he said.
“I think we're now at the point where we get to decide how to get this right going forward,” Miller added.
Still, not all crypto lawyers are breathing sighs of relief. Drew Hinkes, a partner at Winston & Strawn specializing in digital assets, believes crypto projects should only drop their guard if and when the SEC makes concrete declarations regarding specific tokens or token categories.
“The industry needs more than vibes,” Hinkes told Decrypt. “I can't advise a client based on what I think somebody else might do in the future.”
The attorney contends that the SEC’s recent streak of crypto case dismissals has done little to determine the issue of how most individual tokens should be classified and regulated. For that reason, he considers the industry to currently be hovering “in a zone of uncertainty.”
But still, there are promising signs. On Monday, Hinkes flew to Washington to meet with the SEC’s crypto task force along with two other prominent crypto-focused legal experts: J.W. Verret and Jason Gottlieb. At the meeting, the lawyers presented an elaborate proposal laying out how the SEC should move forward with crypto regulation in sixteen different areas.
Hinkes left the meeting more at ease than when he entered it.
“It was an extremely encouraging and productive meeting,” he said. “There was a lot of openness to ideas.”
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