On July 16, 2018, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) issued a customer advisory on digital tokens. Citing various studies and reports, the advisory identified high rates of fraud in some initial coin offerings, and warned investors to be on the lookout for the following risks associated with investing in digital tokens:
- The potential for forks in open-source applications that could split away market participants, increase the number of digital coins or make coins obsolete.
- Decrease in mining or validation costs (if price is tied to those factors).
- Acceptance of other currencies, coins or tokens for offered goods and services.
- The link between the value of a digital coin or token and the offered product or service.
- Adoption of the digital coin or token as a broad medium of exchange or store of value.
- Future competitors or technological changes that could disrupt the underlying business.
- Future demand or uses for an application, network, product or service.
- Liquidity in the market for a specific digital coin or token.
- Changes to the underlying technology that could devalue digital coins or tokens.
- Risk of theft from hacking.
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On January 28, 2026, staff at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a Statement on Tokenized Securities. The Statement describes different categories of tokenized securities of interest to the SEC staff and includes technical descriptions of each category.
In mid-January 2026, key Senate committees published discussion drafts of market structure legislation for comprehensive federal regulation of digital assets. The Senate Banking Committee’s version of the bill is called the “Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.” The Senate Agriculture Committee’s version of the bill is called the “Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act.”
In a recent social media post and television interview, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins announced that US capital markets are "poised to move on-chain.” At the same time, on December 11, 2025, the SEC staff issued a no-action letter to a prominent registered clearing agency and securities depositary to launch a securities tokenization pilot program. The pilot program will allow participants to transfer tokenized securities to registered wallets of other participants.
On November 10, 2025, Chairman John Boozman (R-MT) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee released a discussion draft of legislation regulating crypto markets in the United States. The draft is similar in several ways to the Clarity Act, which the House of Representatives passed in July 2025.
The Hunton Blockchain Blog features opinions and legal analysis as we follow the development and use of distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain.
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