The United States Securities Commission (SEC) has recently proposed a public fund-raising framework for encryption projects to allow the issuer to raise up to $75 million per year through an extended version of Regulation A+, without complete securities registration. According to the external media review, the package is closer to the traditional compliance path, but the launch time is late and it is difficult to cover the main financing modalities of the current encrypted market.

Proposal requests close to public release

According to the proposal, the projecter is required to submit the Form 1-A document to the SEC, disclosing the business plan, team background, fund-raising purposes, token rights and risk factors and providing audited financial statements. Once approved, issuers will also be required to continuously disclose semi-annual updates and major matters and to move to a complete registration system after two consecutive years of compliance.

The proposal also requires disclosure of risk information related to tokens such as smart contract audits, wallet hosting, etc. Secondary transactions can, in principle, be conducted in a registered alternative trading system, but this license path is not currently widely used on mainstream encrypted trading platforms.

The audit cycle is hard to keep pace with the market.

According to external sources, the issue of Reg A+ is not only the cost of compliance, but also time. Traditional Reg A+ audits usually take between three and six months, while encrypted market narratives and liquidity windows change rapidly and projects often cannot withstand long waiting cycles.

The article recalls that in 2017 to 2018, at the peak of the issuance of tokens, the project raised more than $20 billion through a white paper and an Etherwood contract. Since then, SEC has been involved in the market mainly through law enforcement rather than prior regulation. It was observed that, by the time the draft rules were introduced, there had been a marked change in the financing structure of the industry.

Airdrops and Launchpad have been mainstreamed

According to the article, in 2026 the capital formation of the encryption project was no longer dominated by traditional token sales to the public. The Solana Eco-Pump.fun, Four.Meme platform on BNB Chain allows users to issue money and start transactions in minutes, and funds are quickly entering the market through chain mechanisms.

At the same time, air-drop and credit schemes have become common ways of starting new projects. For example, projects such as Hyperliquid, Bluur, Eigen, Ethena, Jupiter have been distributing tokens through user behaviour incentives. Such models are closer to distribution rather than direct sales and therefore do not fall within the core of the regulation of the proposal.

Private sources are still taking on significant financing.

Apart from public distribution, infrastructure projects are still generally financed through SAFT agreements and Reg D private fundraising for eligible investors. Citing Galaxy Research data, the article states that the encryption windfall financing was approximately $13.7 billion in 2025, and that it was close to that level in 2026. It was observed that for such projects, new open funding paths did not provide sufficiently clear efficiency advantages.

The central judgement of the commentary is that the proposal is not institutionally unfeasible, but it applies primarily to a small number of projects that are willing to undertake audit, continuous disclosure and longer audit cycles. The practical impact of this may be limited for the current reliance on mainstream encryption markets for distribution, air drop distribution and private fundraising.