SEC Chair Atkins Pitches Three-Pillar Crypto Rules to Fast-Track Bitcoin (BTC) Clarity

Atkins Backs Clarity Act, Vows Parallel SEC Push

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins urged Congress on Monday to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, telling a Washington audience the Senate should send the market-structure bill to the president’s desk as soon as possible — even as he promised the agency will press forward with its own crypto rulemaking “with or without” the legislation. Speaking at a proof-of-stake network Solana’s policy institute event in the capital, Atkins made the remarks hours before the Senate was set to hold a cloture vote — the procedural test of whether the sweeping bill has enough support to advance — on Tuesday afternoon U.S. Eastern time.

Atkins framed the SEC’s parallel agenda, branded Project Crypto, around three initiatives he called the pillars of a single, rational and comprehensive regulatory architecture. The first is the proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, which he described as one of the commission’s most significant efforts to modernize securities regulation for the asset class; if adopted, it would give entrepreneurs firmer ground to raise capital using digital assets instead of having to guess what the law is as they go. The second is an overhaul of transfer agent rules — provisions untouched in any serious way for roughly four decades and built for paper stock certificates — to recognize blockchains as digital ownership ledgers as tokenized assets spread through markets. The third targets custody: Atkins said he has asked SEC staff to draft a proposal that would allow investment advisers, under certain conditions, to hold crypto assets themselves or to use state trust companies as custodians, noting that qualified third-party custodians do not yet exist for some assets and that the state trust pathway already works in practice. Self-custody, long the preserve of hardware wallets secured by a Ledger recovery key, would become a regulated option for advisers for the first time. “The SEC should not be the last institution to notice that the world actually has changed,” he said.

Banking Groups and State AGs Push Back

The push for Tuesday’s vote landed with the bill already facing an uphill climb. Eight banking groups, including the American Bankers Association, the Bank Policy Institute and the Independent Community Bankers of America, urged Senate leaders on Monday to tighten restrictions on stablecoin interest and rewards — payments on dollar-pegged tokens, an asset class spanning major issuers and purpose-built rails such as Stable, Tether’s USDT-native Layer 1 — arguing the current approach could still trigger deposit flight and shrink lending. Separately, a coalition of 18 attorneys general from the states and the District of Columbia warned the draft could weaken their ability to pursue crypto-related fraud, urging senators to vote no unless those powers are protected. Early optimism faded as the day wore on: prediction-market odds of the legislation becoming law in 2026 slid to 17% by Monday afternoon, giving back most of a surge to around 30% earlier in the session, with several key disputes still unresolved. The stakes for traders are direct — the bill would clarify how tokens are policed across venues, from centralized platforms to a decentralized exchange, reshaping oversight of spot trading in the largest crypto market. Bitcoin (BTC) changed hands near $78,000 as of publication, with the vote seen as the week’s pivotal event. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

Tuesday’s Cloture Vote in Focus

Read together, the two developments show a regulator building its own framework rather than waiting on Congress. Our reading of the bill text as filed: the Clarity Act remains a pending measure — a cloture vote is a procedural step, not enactment, and until signed into law it binds neither the SEC nor the CFTC. That distinction matters, because Atkins’s three-pillar agenda proceeds under existing authority either way. With disputes unresolved and odds at 17%, investors weighing custody arrangements or the best crypto exchanges should treat the legislative path as uncertain while the SEC’s own rules advance regardless.