No Trade Group Has Commented on the SEC's Crypto Rule

The Securities and Exchange Commission published its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets in the Federal Register on 21 August 2026, at 91 FR 54510. It runs to 146 pages, amends six parts of title 17 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and would create the first tailored offering regime for investment contracts involving crypto assets. Comments are due on 20 October.

HaiPay read the public comment file on 27 August. It holds 32 entries. Thirty-one are public comments. One is a memorandum recording a meeting with Commission officials. Not one comment comes from a trade association, an exchange, an asset manager or a bank.

What is in the file

The Commission posted the release on 18 August, three days before Federal Register publication, and the first comments arrived that same day. Between 18 and 25 August the file grew by five, seven, seven, one, one, five, two and four entries. Nothing had been posted for 26 or 27 August when we read it. Posting lags submission, so the number actually filed is at least 32 and may be higher.

Of the 31 public comments, 14 carry a company or professional title in the signature and 17 are signed by individuals with no affiliation given. The 14 organisations named are Ohanae, Rivetz, Beeezo, Kelly Legacy Institute, Sovereign Stack Initiative, Ozmium, Goliath Engineering Technology, ARKONIX, Globefin.org, InvestedUSA.org, Baton Corporation, R3ference, Moschetti Syndication Law and Persistence Analytics Group. Every one of them is a small firm or a sole practitioner.

Commenter identities are self-reported. The Commission does not verify them, and the file should be read with that in mind: one entry is signed "George Soros, Financial Advisor", and HaiPay makes no claim about who wrote it. This is why the figures above count entries and signatures rather than verified institutions.

Who is not in the file

We searched all 32 entries for 21 names that would be expected on a rulemaking of this size — the major securities and banking trade bodies, the large crypto exchanges and issuers, the big asset managers, the main investor-protection groups. None appears.

That absence is not evidence of indifference, and it should not be reported as such. Large filers write long comment letters, clear them through counsel and a board, and file at or near the deadline. On a 60-day period that means October. The file as it stands is simply the early file, and the early file on almost any significant rulemaking looks like this one.

What makes it worth counting is the corollary. Fifty-four days remain, and the record that the Commission must consider is, at this moment, almost entirely composed of individuals and very small companies. For anyone who wants a specific number or condition in this proposal changed, the practical observation is that the queue is short and the door is open.

What is on the table

The proposal would create two exemptions from the registration requirements of section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. The first would permit offerings of up to $5 million during a four-year period. The second would permit offerings of up to $75 million during each 12-month period. Under both, issuers would have to make principles-based narrative disclosures available to their investors. Issuers relying on the second would additionally have to provide financial statements and would be subject to ongoing reporting requirements. Under both, the antifraud and antimanipulation provisions of the federal securities laws continue to apply.

The proposal would also create a conditional safe harbor from the term "investment contract" in the definitions of "security" in both the 1933 Act and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Where the conditions of that safe harbor are satisfied, the crypto asset would fall outside that term. That is the provision with the widest consequences, and it is the one on which a thin comment record is least comfortable.

A trap for anyone tracking this rule

There is a regulations.gov docket for this proposal, SEC-2026-5190. When HaiPay queried it through the regulations.gov API on 27 August, it returned zero comments.

That figure is real and it is meaningless as a measure of engagement. The rule's own ADDRESSES section lists three ways to comment: the Commission's internet comment form, an email to rule-comments@sec.gov quoting File Number S7-2026-27, and paper mail to the Secretary. regulations.gov is not among them. Anyone monitoring this rulemaking through the government-wide docket system, or through a tool that reads it, is watching a channel the Commission is not using. The comments are posted on sec.gov, and there are 32 of them.

What we could not verify

We could not establish the total number of comments submitted, only the number posted. The Commission does not publish a submission-to-posting lag, and the gap between the last posted entry on 25 August and our read on 27 August is consistent with either a lag or a genuine pause.

We did not read all 32 comments in full, so this piece makes no claim about what commenters argued, only about how many there are and who signed them. The classification into company-affiliated and individual signatures is HaiPay's, applied to the signature text as posted; a person who filed in a professional capacity without saying so would be counted as an individual.

What to watch

Three things will tell you whether the record is turning. The first is the arrival of the trade associations, which will be visible on sec.gov well before it is reported. The second is whether the Commission's separate form-letter view begins to populate — it was empty on 27 August, meaning no organised campaign had yet been mounted on either side. The third is any extension of the 20 October deadline, which is the usual response when a significant rulemaking draws a record the agency considers insufficient.

Until then, the comment file on the SEC's largest crypto proposal is 32 entries long, and a payments or crypto business that wants to be in it has 54 days and very little company.