Five categories: the SEC and CFTC finally agree on what a crypto asset is

For most of the last decade, the legal character of a crypto asset in the United States was determined case by case, largely through enforcement. On 17 March 2026 the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a joint interpretation on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets. It is binding on both agencies, and it is the first coordinated classification framework either has published.

The taxonomy

The interpretation sorts crypto assets into five categories by characteristics, use and function: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securities. Digital commodities, collectibles, tools and certain stablecoins are held not to be securities in themselves, with an important qualification examined below. The digital securities category is drawn narrowly, addressing tokenised versions of conventional financial instruments. Eighteen major cryptocurrencies are named as examples of digital commodities.

What was taken out of scope

The interpretation also confirms that several activities are not subject to the federal securities laws: protocol mining and protocol staking, the wrapping of assets, and airdrops distributing non-security crypto assets. Each of these had been a live source of legal risk with no authoritative answer, and staking in particular had been the subject of contradictory signals for years.

A taxonomy is worth less for the lines it draws than for the arguments it ends. Most of the value here is in the questions that no longer require a lawyer's opinion.

The pattern behind it

The joint interpretation sits alongside two related 2026 moves. In January, the SEC's divisions of Corporation Finance, Investment Management, and Trading and Markets issued a joint statement on tokenised securities, confirming that a security represented on a blockchain remains subject to existing federal securities law: tokenisation does not change the legal nature of the underlying asset. In March, the Federal Reserve Board, the OCC and the FDIC published a joint FAQ on capital treatment, taking the position that the capital rule is technology neutral: an eligible tokenised security receives the same capital treatment as the same security in conventional form.

Read together, the three form a single principle. Regulate the economic substance; treat the ledger as an implementation detail. It is an unglamorous position, and it is almost certainly the right one for a jurisdiction that already has a functioning body of securities and banking law it does not want to duplicate.

What it means outside the United States

For jurisdictions writing digital-asset frameworks, the American approach is now a genuine alternative model to the European one. The EU chose to regulate service providers through a bespoke regime; the US has chosen to classify instruments and route them into existing law. The first produces a clean licensing perimeter and a new supervisory function. The second produces a smaller rulebook but demands regulators capable of applying decades of existing doctrine to novel facts.