Elliptic’s Policy Chief Says Crypto Needs a ‘Healing Moment’

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The cryptocurrency sector has had so many milestones by now that it is enough to make anyone’s head spin.

But when the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a joint statement Sept. 2 allowing exchanges in the United States to list certain crypto asset products, the announcement marked what could become a true turning point.

“Market participants should have the freedom to choose where they trade spot crypto assets,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in the statement. “The SEC is committed to working with the CFTC to ensure that our regulatory frameworks support innovation and competition in these rapidly evolving markets.”

For the first time, top market regulators in the U.S. are speaking with one voice on digital assets. The move represents a departure from earlier years of turf battles that pushed crypto market innovation offshore.

Liat Shetret, vice president of global policy and regulation at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, called it “almost a healing moment… an opportunity to put confidence in the industry and to those that are looking to innovate here in America.”

That confidence could prove decisive.

“Up until a few months ago, we saw almost reconnaissance missions of crypto businesses looking in other jurisdictions,” Shetret told PYMNTS in an interview. “They were leaving the U.S., and they were looking at Europe, they were looking at Asia, they were looking at the Caribbean. They were looking at all these different jurisdictions to find regulatory clarity, to find regulatory understanding.”

But that’s shifting.

“There’s excitement now around bringing it back home, bringing it back to America,” she said.

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The existing signal from the joint statement is that digital assets are not going away, and that U.S. regulators intend to bring them inside the perimeter of financial supervision.

Behind the scenes, banks and asset managers are revisiting strategies shelved after the collapse of FTX. Some remain skeptical, but the joint regulatory step has reopened conversations about tokenization, stablecoins and partnerships between traditional finance and crypto-native firms.

Nasdaq, for example, announced Monday (Sep. 8) it had submitted a filing to the SEC to facilitate the trading of tokenized securities on its markets.

“The regulators speak to each other, they share insights, they share products, they share tooling, they share software,” Shetret said, adding that financial regulation has always carried a ripple effect across jurisdictions. “And I think there’s a lot of learning going on in those forums that are impacting the markets.”

Innovation is also alive in stablecoins, tokenization projects and partnerships between banks and crypto natives for treasury services. The common denominator is risk literacy.

“A big chunk of the conversations are coming around kind of source of funds in terms of understanding source of wealth,” Shetret said.

Historically, any wealth linked to digital assets triggered red flags. Now, nuance is emerging, she said

“That has to be parsed out into multiple shades of gray to understand that source of funds being digital assets doesn’t automatically need to mean high alerts or de-risk, de-bank,” she said.

“At the end of the day, there’s a lot of growth and educational understanding that with proper understanding, knowledge and tooling, we can actually do a lot safely and soundly,” she added. “But getting there and making sure that every institution is comfortable is a series of conversations.”

Copy-Paste Compliance With a Crypto Twist

Still, the road ahead is not without caveats. The agencies’ statement is a staff-level declaration, not a formal rulemaking or congressional mandate. That tension between momentum and uncertainty is itself a microcosm for the state of the U.S. crypto market today, which is optimistic but cautious.

However, after years of policy whiplash, the market is adjusting to the idea of sustained, incremental progress toward regulatory integration rather than abrupt reversals. One reason for growing confidence is that compliance need not be reinvented from scratch.

Existing financial regulations around anti-money laundering checks, sanctions screening and fraud detection can frequently apply directly to crypto markets. Crypto requires adaptation, not wholesale replacement.

“There’s a whole set of existing compliance frameworks that can literally be copy-pasted… over to crypto and then reviewed for crypto savviness,” Shetret said.

The challenge is not regulatory invention but organizational upskilling and teaching compliance teams how to apply familiar principles to new asset classes.

Because crypto is inherently cross-border, global harmonization is not just aspirational but necessary. The U.S. shift may accelerate that process. But Shetret stressed that operational details still matter.

“From America’s perspective, we’re definitely seeing green, all systems go, but still coming back to details, how do we operationalize it?” she said.

The orchestration challenge will be ensuring all stakeholders, from regulators to compliance officers to product developers, move in sync. Institutions that master that alignment may gain first-mover advantages.