Atkins also sketched an ambitious market-structure blueprint. He backed side-by-side trading of non-security crypto assets and crypto-asset securities on SEC-regulated venues, floated a “Reg Super-App” concept to let broker-dealers offer trading, staking and lending under a single license, and said he would seek to modernize custody rules so investment advisers and broker-dealers can hold crypto assets under updated standards. “It will be a priority of my chairmanship to carry out the [report’s] recommendation to modernize the SEC’s custody requirements,” he noted, while defending users’ right to self-custody and staking.
While Atkins’ prepared remarks did not name Ethereum explicitly, they repeatedly referenced Ethereum-native concepts and standards, and outside the speech the chair has recently spoken more directly about ETH. In a July 21 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Atkins said the agency has “stated informally more than formally that Ether is not a security,” adding that whether corporates hold ETH in treasury “is up to companies to decide.”
Conner unpacked the same themes in an eight-part thread that ricocheted across Crypto-X. The former core dev argued that the speech “isn’t just lip service. It’s a full-blown regulatory pivot,” stressing that Atkins had “informally but unmistakably” removed the security overhang from Ether. “That’s the clarity institutions have been waiting for,” he wrote, predicting corporate-treasury allocations and a deep link-up between DeFi and Wall Street.
He hailed the endorsement of public-chain tokenization as still more consequential: “He said: let’s bring regulated markets on-chain… Ethereum is the obvious base layer for this.” And, in a swipe at legacy doctrine, Conner cheered the promise of purpose-built rules: “No more trying to jam crypto into 1940s laws.”
Whether that enthusiasm endures will depend on how quickly Project Crypto moves from rhetorical flourish to concrete rule-making—but, as Conner put it in his closing salvo, “ETH isn’t just a coin anymore. It’s the US government’s preferred settlement layer for modern finance. Regulatory uncertainty has been ETH’s biggest overhang, and now it’s being lifted. The SEC just put Ethereum in the spotlight as the foundation for the next era of US finance. This is bigger than an ETF. It’s regulatory alignment with ETH as the global digital asset backbone. Get ready.”
At press time, ETH traded at $3,669.
