SEC rules leave Bitcoin untouched as pure commodity, stablecoins non-securities

After years of enforcement actions, lawsuits, and the regulatory equivalent of “I’ll know it when I see it,” the SEC and CFTC have finally put pen to paper on what counts as a security in crypto and what doesn’t. The answer, released March 17, 2026, is surprisingly clean: Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, and Cardano are digital commodities. Payment stablecoins issued under the GENIUS Act of 2025 are not securities. And the whole framework goes into effect on March 23, 2026. The joint interpretive release establishes a five-category taxonomy for crypto assets under federal securities laws. It’s the most comprehensive attempt by US regulators to draw clear lines around which digital assets fall under the SEC’s jurisdiction and which belong to the CFTC, or to neither. What the taxonomy actually says The five categories sort the entire crypto landscape into distinct regulatory buckets. At one end, assets like BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and ADA are designated as “digital commodities,” meaning they are explicitly not securities. At the other end, tokenized versions of traditional financial instruments, think on-chain stocks or bonds, are definitively classified as securities, subject to full SEC ov...