Christian Kruse and Ryan Chan-Wei
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins put out a statement last week highlighting the release of the SEC’s 2026 regulatory agenda, which aims to return the SEC to its core mission of protecting investors, facilitating capital formation, and maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets.
Based on the items on the agenda, the SEC is certainly on the right track. Four issues illustrate this particularly well: enhancing retail exposure to private markets, updating the exempt offering pathways, rethinking the Consolidated Audit Trail, and clarifying the rules surrounding crypto assets.
Enhancing Retail Exposure to Private Markets
In his statement, Chairman Atkins addresses the arbitrary wealth barriers that the SEC has established to “safeguard” Americans from private securities. Since 1982, the accredited investor standard has dictated which Americans are considered “financially sophisticated” by the government, only allowing these pre-approved investors to participate in private securities markets.
The SEC’s new agenda aims to increase retail investors’ access to private markets through registered investment funds, which have historically been unable to serve most Americans. Making such an adjustment is a positive step toward a freer market for retail investors. This effort should be furthered to offer even broader access to retail investors in the future, but the new agenda is a great start.
Updating the Exempt Offering Pathways
Another item on the agenda aims to update and simplify the exempt offering pathways. Currently, the exempt offering framework is overly complex and sets arbitrary boundaries on who can participate and how much they can invest. For instance, Regulation A (dubbed the Mini-IPO) and Regulation CF (crowdfunding) both cap the amount that non-accredited investors can invest and require companies to increase their reporting requirements as they raise more funds, creating “funding cliffs” where the higher reporting requirements go into effect.
But there are ways to update the existing framework to alleviate many of the current regulatory barriers. Paring down financial disclosure requirements in offering pathways would reduce costs, and removing the accredited investor language from Regulations A and CF would broaden investor access. Regulators could also add an additional exempt offering pathway — known as a micro-offering — to help the smallest businesses access potential investors.
Rethinking the Consolidated Audit Trail
The agenda also takes up the SEC’s market surveillance tool: the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). Justified on the basis that it would help regulators “reconstruct” market events (following the 2010 Flash Crash), the CAT has instead become a government database that records nearly every order, cancellation, modification, and execution across US equities and options markets. But the CAT’s surveillance doesn’t just target criminals. It gives the SEC access to all Americans’ trading data and stores it in one big repository, violating Americans’ privacy and creating both constitutional and security concerns.
The SEC has already started acting on this agenda item by issuing a concept release for a comprehensive review of the CAT. This review is a positive development, and we hope that it marks the first step in a journey that will culminate in the elimination of the CAT entirely.
Clarifying the Rules for Crypto Assets
On crypto, the agenda seeks to clarify how these assets are offered and sold, potentially through exemptions and safe harbors, which is an idea that has been on the SEC’s agenda since 2025 as part of the broader Project Crypto initiative. This clarification would give issuers new routes to raise capital and could form the basis for a safe harbor for decentralized finance (DeFi) innovation built on existing exemptive authority. The SEC’s constructive posture toward crypto assets under Chairman Atkins should be welcomed, as it will provide much-needed regulatory clarity and promote innovation within the domestic crypto sector.
Another particularly salient development is the SEC’s recent issuance of an interpretation confirming, among other things, that tokenizing a security does not change its underlying legal character. The interpretation was jointly issued with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, marking a milestone in interagency regulatory cooperation; separately, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has said the SEC “stands ready to work with market participants” to address the novel issues raised by tokenization. The SEC’s new approach represents a remarkable shift from the agency’s reliance on “regulation by enforcement” in the recent past. However, agency rulemaking does not confer the same durability as legislation, and it is imperative for Congress to enact clear and comprehensive market structure legislation to ensure that the recent progress in crypto asset regulation endures for years to come.
Conclusion
The SEC is headed in the right direction and should be commended for its concerted effort to refocus on its core mission. However, it is even more important to ensure that the trajectory set by this agenda results in concrete policy outcomes.
There are at least three areas of focus where the SEC should push the envelope and advance meaningful reform. First, efforts to expand retail access to private securities through registered investment funds should be coupled with an overhaul of the accredited investor standard that unfairly limits participation. Second, efforts to update exempt offering pathways should emphasize reducing financial disclosure requirements, creating a micro-offering exemption, and removing the accredited investor language from Regulations A and CF. Third, the CAT should be abolished, and the SEC should commit to a deadline for doing so.
The SEC’s work on crypto assets to date provides a clear example of how the agency can fulfill its mandate to promote and protect America’s capital markets. Its broader regulatory agenda is equally promising and, if implemented thoughtfully and courageously, could define a new era for America’s capital markets.
