Eric Connor, a well-known Ethereum figure who helped design the network’s groundbreaking paid market overhaul EIP-1559, recently left the ecosystem to work in artificial intelligence, said the new Securities and Exchange Commission policy direction would be a dramatic tailwind for the ether. “The SEC has just been lit by rockets under Ethereum,” Connor wrote on X on July 31, responding to a policy address that Washington Chairman Paul S. Atkins delivered hours ago. Connor characterized the statement as a “full-fledged regulatory pivot,” adding that Atkins “sayed it unmistakable, though informal.”
Is Ethereum the biggest beneficiary of Project Crypto?
Atkins’ prepared speech entitled “American Leadership in Digital Finance Revolution” announced a program called Project Crypto. “We are at the threshold of a new era… I am announcing the launch of ‘Project Crypto’. This is a committee-wide initiative to modernize securities rules and regulations that allow American financial markets to move in chains,” the chairman said he linked the initiative to the recent push for White House-led policies, directing SEC staff to draft clear rules on cryptocurrency distribution, custody and trading, and to consider interpretation and exemption relief “in the coming months” to avoid stifling innovation.
The most consequential signal in the digital assets market was Atkins’ stance on asset classification. “In spite of what the SEC has said in the past, most crypto assets are not securities,” he said, promising “bright line rules” that will help market participants decide whether tokens should be treated as digitally collectable, digital commodities, or stable or stable products, and tokens to create a secure port. In parallel, he argued that “it should not be a scar-colored letter” classifying tokens as security, and that he outlined the way crypto security would thrive within the US market.
Atkins also sketched the blueprints of ambitious markets and structures. He said it would help trade non-security crypto assets and crypto asset securities side by side in security-regulated venues, bringing out the “Reg Super-App” concept, allowing broker-dealers to offer trading, staking and lending under a single license, modernizing custody rules and allowing investment advisors and Broker-Dealers to hold Crypto Assets. “Implementing the recommendations (in the report) to modernize the SEC custody requirements is my priority,” he said, defending users’ independence and staking rights.
Crucially for tokenization, Atkins said the committee will work with companies distributing tokenized securities in the US and provide relief if necessary, pointing to demand for “from the Wall Street generic name to unicorn technology companies,” and stated that compliance, such as ERC-3643, explicitly refers to valid token standards. In the distributed finance section, he pledged to “create spaces” for both fully on-chain, non-intermediate systems and intermediate models, saying Defi would “become a part of our stock market.”
Why Ethereum is the center
Although Atkins’ prepared remarks did not explicitly name Ethereum, they repeatedly referred to the concepts and standards of Ethereum natives, and outside of their speech, Chair recently spoke more directly about ETH. With its appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box on July 21, the agency said it “officially informally stated that ether is not security,” adding that it has “reached a company that decides” whether companies hold ETH in the Treasury Department.
Connor unraveled the same theme in an eight-part thread across Crypto-X. Former Core Dev claimed that the speech was “not just lip service, it’s a full-fledged regulatory pivot,” emphasising Atkins removed security overhangs from the ether “unofficial but unmistakably.” “That’s what a clear institution is waiting for,” he wrote, predicting a deep link-up between business and financial allocation and Defi and Wall Street.
He praised the approval of public chain tokenization as even more consequential. And by swiping through the legacy doctrine, Connor cheered on the promise of a dedicated rule. “We’re no longer trying to cram code into 1940s laws.”
What that enthusiasm endures depends on how quickly the project moves from rhetorical prosperity to concrete rules creation, but as Connor puts in his closing salvo, “ETH is no longer just a coin. It is the preferred settlement layer for modern finance. Regulation uncertainty is the biggest overhang of ETH. This is a coordination with ETH as a Global Digital Asset Backbone.”
At the time of pressing, ETH traded for $3,669.
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