For years, digital assets have lived in a regulatory gray zone of being large enough to demand attention, but often inconsistently defined to fit neatly into traditional securities law analysis. That ambiguity has created no shortage of uncertainty for registered investment advisers (RIAs).
The SEC’s new interpretive release on the application of federal securities laws to certain digital assets and related transactions does not resolve every open question. It does, however, offer a more structured framework for analyzing digital assets under existing securities laws.
For RIAs, the significance of that framework is less about digital assets’ staying power and more about how firms think about classification, diligence, disclosures, communications and risk when digital asset exposure enters the conversation.
One of the notable takeaways of the SEC’s release is its effort to distinguish between different types of digital assets rather than treating them all a
