According to external sources, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced the Encrypted Asset Control proposal after Congress adjourned in August, which divided the United States encryption route again. According to the article, this draft rule of approximately 400 pages is not an alternative to the CLARITY Act; if both sets of frameworks continue, the industry may face inconsistent regulatory requirements.

SEC proposes to supplement the issuance rule

According to the article, the full text of the rules was published by the SEC on 18 August, in an attempt to establish a special distribution system for the current token project, which lacks a compliance path, consisting mainly of three corridors.

  • Initial project exemption: up to $5 million within 4 years
  • Finance exemption: two tranches: $20 million and $75 million
  • Safe harbour for investment contracts: Deleting of security attributes in tokens when conditions are met

Among them, the waiver for start-up projects does not require a threshold for eligible investors and does not impose a single investor ceiling. The scope of application includes not only fund-raising, but also airdrops and network incentives. Projectors are required to submit form NOR before distribution and to disclose information on the currency economy, governance mechanisms, etc. in the official network.

The higher first tranche exemption allows projects to finance up to $75 million within 12 months, subject to the submission of audited financial statements and ongoing annual, semi-annual and interim disclosure obligations. For non-qualified investors, the maximum amount invested is 10 per cent of the higher annual income or net assets.

The token exit security attribute remains empty White

The article states that the most important part of the SEC proposal is the “safe harbour for investment contracts”. Under this design, as long as the issuer completes or permanently ceases the critical management of previous commitments and does not enter into new commitments for these tasks, self-certification of the tokens can be made by submitting the Form TR.

However, according to the article, this mechanism still does not resolve the central question of who will regulate the withdrawal of a token from the security attribute. The SEC proposal did not specify whether the assets were subsequently transferred to the supervision of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), nor did it establish a new statutory classification system.

In other words, the SEC package deals mainly with “how to issue” and “when to withdraw from the security status”, but does not answer “what is after the exit”. This is exactly what the Clarity Act is trying to fill in.

Clarity rewrites the regulatory division of labour

According to the article, the House of Representatives passed the Digital Asset Market Clarity Bill in July 2025 with 294 votes, and the Senate Banking Commission adopted the procedure in May 2026 with 15 to 9, but the Senate did not vote in its entirety before the August recess.

Unlike the SEC proposal, the CLARITY Bill does not add exemptions within the existing SEC mandate, but directly redraws the regulatory boundary. The bill proposes to divide digital assets into three categories:

  • Investment contract assets supervised by SEC
  • Digital goods regulated by the CTC
  • Stable currency included in joint regulation in other frameworks

According to the article, the core of the bill is the “testing of mature block chains”. In order for a token to move from SEC to CFTC regulation, its bottom-up network would have to meet four statutory conditions, including the use of the network for real transactions or authentication, open access to codes, pre-set and transparent operating rules, and 20 per cent of the tokens or voting rights held by any individual or common control group.

In the author's view, this 20% ceiling on warehouse holding is clearly defined by the Act as “sufficient decentrization”. By contrast, the SEC safe harbour relies more on the issuer to determine whether its “critical management effort” has ended and has greater subjectivity.

Two sets of framework differences focused on three points.

According to the article, both the SEC proposal and the CARITY Act recognize the need for clear regulatory attribution of encrypted assets, but they are not consistent on key issues.

First of all, there are token classification. The CLARTY Act directly divides securities, digital goods and stable currency by legislation and designates separate regulators; the SEC proposal does not establish a complete classification system, providing only for issuance exemptions and exit routes for currencies considered to be securities.

The second is the decentrization determination. The CLARTY Act adopts statutory standards and sets a 20% hard hold threshold; the SEC proposal relies on the issuer ' s self-certification to determine whether it has ceased critical regulatory behaviour.

Finally, regulatory coverage. According to the article, the CLARITY Act also includes a protection clause for DeFi developers to exclude software developers who do not have access to client funds from the registration requirements of the SEC and CFTC; the SEC proposal does not address this issue.

The article concludes that the real issue at hand is not necessarily “better” the framework, but rather the one that can be landed first and kept in effect. The United States encryption industry may face two different sets of criteria for the issuance of tokens, regulatory attribution and decentrization, if the SEC rules move forward and Congress acts are put back to the vote.