What the SEC Still Prosecutes in Crypto, and What It Dropped

Scroll through crypto commentary in the summer of 2026 and one line repeats everywhere: the Securities and Exchange Commission spent years suing the industry, and now it has stopped. That version of events is real but incomplete. The SEC did dismiss or close more than a dozen matters against exchanges, market makers, and token issuers in 2025. It did not stop bringing crypto cases altogether, and the cases it kept filing look almost nothing like the ones it walked away from, in theory, in target, or in consequence.

According to Cornerstone Research’s tracking of SEC cryptocurrency enforcement, the agency brought 13 crypto-related actions in 2025, down from 33 in 2024 and 46 in 2023, a 60 percent year-over-year drop and the lowest count since 2017. Five of those 13 actions were filed before Gary Gensler left the chair in January 2025. The remaining eight, filed under new leadership, were overwhelmingly fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, fake trading bots, and investor misrepresentation, rather than the registration theories that defined the prior administration’s approach to the industry. This piece is about that split: which cases got the reset, which ones did not, and why the line between them matters more than the raw count of dismissals that dominates most 2026 coverage of the topic.

From “Regulation by Enforcement” to the Atkins Reset

Gary Gensler’s SEC spent nearly four years pursuing what critics, including sitting commissioners, called regulation by enforcement: using lawsuits and settlements to establish, one case at a time, that most tokens and the platforms trading them were unregistered securities. The approach produced some of the highest-profile securities cases of the decade, including near-simultaneous lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase filed in June 2023, alongside dozens of smaller actions against token issuers, exchanges, and promoters. Gensler’s term as chair ended in January 2025.

Commissioner Mark Uyeda became acting chair and moved quickly. Within weeks he stood up a dedicated Crypto Task Force led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, tasked with building a workable regulatory framework through public engagement rather than litigation, and began winding down the specialized crypto enforcement unit Gensler had built roughly two years earlier.

Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush, was nominated to chair the agency on January 20, 2025, confirmed by the Senate on April 9, and sworn in on April 21, 2025, becoming the SEC’s 34th chair. Within weeks, the backlog of pending crypto lawsuits the new leadership inherited started disappearing, not through court rulings on the merits, but through dismissal motions the Commission itself filed.

Every Major Case the SEC Walked Away From in 2025

Between February and May 2025, the SEC dismissed or closed the following matters, several of them with prejudice, meaning the same claims cannot be refiled later:

OpenSea had been sitting under a Wells notice since August 2024, warning that SEC staff planned to sue the NFT marketplace for allegedly running an unregistered securities exchange; the agency closed the file without any action on February 21, 2025, then did the same with Uniswap Labs days later. Ian Balina, a crypto promoter the SEC had pursued since September 2022 over an undisclosed-compensation token promotion, got a similar result: a joint stipulation to dismiss with prejudice, filed May 1, 2025. Coinbase and Kraken, two of the exchanges HOGE Wire has stress-tested for basic account and withdrawal reliability, were among the biggest names to see years-old registration lawsuits disappear that same spring.

The March 27, 2025 stipulation covering Kraken, Consensys, and the market maker Cumberland DRW closed three separate theories in one filing: Kraken’s case centered on its exchange and staking-as-a-service business, Consensys had been targeted over its MetaMask wallet’s staking and swap features, and Cumberland faced allegations of trading unregistered securities while acting as an unregistered dealer. Grouping them into a single joint stipulation signaled that the new Commission viewed all three as variations of the same registration theory it no longer wanted to litigate, rather than as cases with meaningfully different facts underneath.

None of these closures reflected a judge ruling on the underlying legal theory. The Commission’s own filings describe the dismissals as discretionary, made to support what it called a broader effort to reform its approach to the industry, not a finding that the conduct originally alleged was lawful. That distinction, a policy reset rather than a legal vindication, is the detail that gets lost when the story is compressed into “the SEC lost” or “the SEC surrendered.”

Why the SEC Says It Dropped Them, and Why One Commissioner Disagreed

Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the Crypto Task Force, has framed the retreat as correcting a process problem rather than handing the industry a favor. At ETH Denver, she said the agency’s prior posture had been “very strange from the perspective of people who favor regulation as a solution,” arguing that suing first and writing rules later had pushed legitimate projects out of the country without protecting the people still using US platforms. Describing her approach to the task force’s mandate, Peirce has said the goal is making sure “policy is not being driven by the enforcement, but enforcement follows where policy is,” adding that the division does not want to “use our enforcement division to write regulatory policy.”

Not every commissioner agrees, and the disagreement is on the public record. When the Commission finalized its Ripple settlement request in May 2025, Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw filed a public dissent, writing that the move, “alongside the programmatic disassembly of the SEC’s crypto enforcement program, does a tremendous disservice to the investing public and undermines the court’s role in interpreting our securities laws.” Crenshaw warned that walking away from established legal standards in favor of an undefined future framework created what she called a regulatory vacuum: in her words, if Ripple sold unregistered XRP to institutional buyers the very next day “in plain defiance of the court’s order, this Commission will do absolutely nothing about it.” Two sitting commissioners, reading the same set of facts, reached opposite conclusions about what accountability requires, and that gap has not closed as of mid-2026.

Ripple’s Five-Year Case Ends in a Split Decision

No case captures the ambiguity of the reset better than Ripple. The SEC sued Ripple Labs in December 2020, alleging that years of XRP sales amounted to an unregistered securities offering, and reportedly sought a penalty in the neighborhood of $2 billion. Judge Analisa Torres split the difference in July 2023: institutional sales of XRP violated securities law, sales on public exchanges to retail buyers did not. In August 2024, still under the old SEC, Torres set Ripple’s actual penalty at $125 million and rejected the agency’s request for disgorgement, finding that institutional investors had not shown monetary harm. That ruling predates Atkins entirely.

Both sides had appealed by early 2025. Under the new leadership, the SEC and Ripple tried to jointly ask Torres to release $75 million of that $125 million penalty and lift the injunction against future institutional sales, effectively a private settlement dressed up as a request to the court. Torres declined, ruling she had no procedural mechanism to grant that request while the case sat on appeal. Rather than keep fighting, both sides simply dropped their cross-appeals, closing the case in 2025 with the original $125 million penalty and injunction intact. Ripple never got the discount it negotiated with the new SEC; it kept the number a federal judge had already ordered under the old one, which is a subtler outcome than either “Ripple won” or “the SEC backed down,” and it is the outcome that actually happened.

Project Crypto: Replacing Lawsuits With a Rulebook

If enforcement is retreating from registration theories, the agency’s own explanation is that rulemaking is supposed to fill the gap. Atkins used a July 31, 2025 speech at the America First Policy Institute to unveil what he called Project Crypto, a commission-wide initiative to rewrite how securities law applies to on-chain markets, and returned to the theme in a November 2025 address at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. By May 2026 he was outlining four specific areas the agency wants to clarify through rulemaking rather than litigation:

• What counts as an exchange when trading happens on-chain
• How broker-dealer rules apply to software interfaces instead of people
• How clearing agency standards should handle instant, on-chain settlement
• How to treat crypto vaults and other structures that generate yield

The agency is also working with the CFTC on a shared token taxonomy meant to settle, structurally rather than case by case, when a digital asset counts as a security. Atkins has been explicit that none of this is meant as a favor to the industry. “This is not a favor to industry, it is what markets require to function: clear rules of the road, applied without preference,” he said, adding that the SEC’s job is “to set the rules of play and referee the game, not to pick the winning team.” Atkins has also flagged a forthcoming innovation exemption intended to let novel on-chain products launch under temporary relief while permanent rules catch up, and in 2026 became the first sitting SEC chair to address the Bitcoin conference circuit directly, using the appearance to repeat the administration’s line that the agency’s job is to write rules, not pick winners.

Some of that rulemaking has already landed. In August 2025, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a staff statement concluding that certain liquid staking activity, the kind that underpins much of the liquid-staked ETH market HOGE Wire has covered in detail, does not involve the offer or sale of a security. A parallel push toward new listing standards for crypto exchange-traded products is reshaping how funds reach the market, a process detailed separately here. None of it required a single lawsuit.

The Fraud Docket That Never Slowed Down

Set aside the dismissals and look only at what the SEC filed for the first time in 2025, and a different picture appears. Of the 13 crypto-related actions the agency brought that year, five were already in motion before Gensler left; the other eight, filed under the new leadership, were overwhelmingly fraud cases rather than registration cases, per Cornerstone Research’s review. That pattern has continued into 2026. In March, the agency charged an Oklahoma resident, Krish Kumar, with making materially false and misleading representations to investors while raising roughly $7.8 million. It has also pursued cases such as one against Nathan Fuller, accused of running a fake AI-powered trading bot that collected about $12.3 million from investors before regulators intervened.

Total monetary penalties against digital-asset market participants fell to $142 million in 2025, less than three percent of the 2024 figure, but 2024’s number was inflated by a single outlier: the $4.47 billion fraud settlement the SEC reached with Terraform Labs and Do Kwon over the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna, approved by a federal court in June 2024 and split between a $420 million civil fine, $3.6 billion in disgorgement, and $467 million in interest. Strip that one case out and the year-over-year penalty decline looks far less dramatic. The message from the current Commission is consistent: an unregistered token sale with honest disclosure and no injured investors is now something the agency would rather address through rulemaking, but a Ponzi scheme wrapped in crypto branding still gets sued, and increasingly still gets referred to the Department of Justice alongside the civil case.

Justin Sun, Tron, and the Fine Print of “Fraud”

The case that best illustrates how blurry the line between fraud and registration can get in practice is Justin Sun’s. The SEC sued Sun, the Tron Foundation, and BitTorrent Foundation in March 2023, alleging fraudulent wash trading of TRX and unregistered offers and sales of TRX and BTT. The litigation dragged on for roughly three years until, on March 5, 2026, the SEC and Sun reached a settlement: Rainberry Inc, the Tron-linked entity formerly known as BitTorrent, agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty, and the parties settled only on violations of Section 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act, the negligence-based fraud provision that does not require proving intent to deceive. Sun neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s original allegations.

That distinction, dropping the intent-based fraud charges while keeping a negligence-based one, is exactly what critics point to. Senator Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement that “Justin Sun poured $90 million into Trump’s crypto ventures, and today the SEC agreed to drop its case against him. The SEC should not be a lap dog for Trump’s billionaire buddies,” adding that Atkins had told Congress the previous month that the administration was not giving crypto billionaires a free pass. The SEC has not publicly linked the settlement’s terms to Sun’s business dealings, and its filings describe the resolution in purely legal terms. But the Sun case shows that “still prosecuted” and “prosecuted on the same theory as before” are not the same thing. The fraud docket survived; the specific legal theories underneath it did not always survive intact.

FTX Did Not Get the Same Reset

If the 2025 reset had a hard boundary, FTX marks it. Unlike the exchange and token-issuer cases the SEC walked away from, the agency pushed its FTX-related actions to a close entirely on its own terms. On December 19, 2025, the SEC filed proposed final consent judgments against three former FTX and Alameda Research executives: Caroline Ellison, Alameda’s former chief executive, and Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, both former FTX executives. Ellison agreed to a ten-year officer-and-director bar, while Wang and Singh agreed to eight-year bars. All three consented to permanent injunctions against violating the antifraud provisions of the Exchange Act and Securities Act, plus five-year conduct-based injunctions, without admitting or denying allegations that Sam Bankman-Fried, Wang, and Singh, with Ellison’s knowledge, had exempted Alameda from FTX’s own risk controls and funneled customer funds to it through what regulators described as a virtually unlimited line of credit.

Bankman-Fried himself was convicted on criminal fraud charges in November 2023 and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024; the SEC’s civil case against him effectively concluded once the criminal verdict was in, leaving Ellison, Wang, and Singh, all of whom cooperated with prosecutors, as the remaining civil defendants heading into the FTX case’s final chapter. The FTX resolutions work as a useful control group for everything else in this piece. They show that when the SEC believes actual investor money disappeared through deception, the friendlier tone under Atkins does not extend to leniency on individual accountability. Registration violations against people who never cost investors a dollar got dismissed with prejudice. Fraud that actually emptied customer accounts got officer bars and permanent injunctions regardless of who was chairing the Commission.

The Whistleblower Pipeline Keeps Running

One part of the enforcement machine that has not slowed down at all is the tip line. The SEC’s whistleblower program received about 27,000 tips in fiscal 2025, roughly 8 percent more than the prior year, and paid out more than $60 million in awards to 48 individuals. Crypto and crypto-asset securities made up about 7 percent of whistleblower complaint categories, a smaller slice than in 2023, when cryptocurrency-related matters accounted for 46 enforcement actions, the highest count since the whistleblower program’s 2011 inception, but still a meaningful stream given how much the broader crypto enforcement docket has otherwise shrunk. Since the program began, whistleblower tips have helped the agency recover more than $6 billion in total monetary sanctions, and the SEC has paid out more than $2.2 billion to tipsters directly.

The program’s largest recent single payout, an award exceeding $50 million issued in April 2026, went to a tip that advanced an investigation into misleading corporate disclosures rather than a crypto matter specifically, a reminder that the whistleblower pipeline serves the SEC’s entire enforcement portfolio, not crypto alone. But the steady flow of smaller crypto-related tips keeps feeding the fraud cases described above, since many Ponzi schemes and fake-trading-bot operations are first flagged internally, by an investor, an employee, or a competitor, long before regulators open a file. Whistleblower awards are tied to fraud actions that produce monetary sanctions, not registration cases, which is exactly the category of enforcement the Atkins-era SEC says it has no interest in retreating from.

What FY2025’s Headline Numbers Actually Mean

Zoom out from crypto specifically, and the SEC’s overall enforcement numbers tell a similar story of decline paired with a large asterisk. The agency’s fiscal year 2025 enforcement results, announced April 7, 2026 for the period running October 2024 through September 2025, show 456 total enforcement actions, including 303 standalone actions, down 22 percent and 30 percent respectively from fiscal 2024. The Commission’s own framing called the shift a necessary course correction in how it enforces federal securities law around crypto assets specifically.

The dollar figures need more care. The SEC reported obtaining orders for $17.9 billion in total monetary relief in FY2025, which sounds like an aggressive year. But $14.9 billion of that figure came from a single, sixteen-year-old case, the judgment against Robert Allen Stanford’s Ponzi scheme, originally charged back in 2009. Strip that one matter out and FY2025’s monetary relief totals roughly $2.7 billion, split between $1.3 billion in penalties and $1.4 billion in disgorgement, a genuinely smaller number than in recent years. The table below lines up the crypto-specific figures against that broader three-year backdrop.

The “Pay to Play” Allegations in Congress

The dismissals have not gone unchallenged politically. On January 14, 2026, senior House Financial Services Committee Democrats, including Ranking Member Maxine Waters, sent a letter to Atkins alleging a pattern CoinDesk summarized as pay to play: crypto companies and executives who donated heavily to President Trump’s campaign and inauguration, including Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, Robinhood, and Crypto.com, saw their SEC matters dismissed or stalled soon after. Waters singled out the Sun case specifically, writing that “these activities create the unmistakable appearance of a pay-to-play arrangement: a defendant to an SEC enforcement action pours tens of millions into ventures tied to the president’s family, and shortly thereafter, his case is stayed.”

The SEC has not conceded the point. Atkins told Congress the administration was not giving crypto billionaires a free pass, and the agency’s public position is that its FY2025 approach reflects a policy reset applied evenly, not favors tied to individual donors. Both things can be true from a strictly legal standpoint and still leave a credibility problem: a regulator that drops cases involving its own political patrons, for whatever underlying reason, invites exactly the scrutiny Waters and Warren are giving it. That tension, more than the raw count of dismissals, is likely to shape how aggressively a future SEC majority revisits matters the current Commission closed. Cases dismissed with prejudice cannot be refiled on the same claims, but that does not bind a differently composed future Commission from pursuing new theories against the same underlying conduct.

What Still Draws a Wells Notice in 2026

For founders, exchanges, and investors trying to read the actual risk environment rather than the headlines, the 2025 and 2026 record suggests a reasonably consistent checklist of what still draws serious scrutiny:

• Specific, quantifiable claims of investor losses or misappropriated funds
• Undisclosed compensation for promoting or touting a token
• Missing, commingled, or misrepresented custody of client assets
• Marketing that promises guaranteed or fixed returns from an on-chain product

Each of those four categories anchors an active case somewhere in this piece: investor losses (Kumar, Fuller), undisclosed touting (Balina, though the SEC chose to drop that one), custody (a standing Division of Examinations priority independent of any rulemaking), and yield-related marketing (the crypto vault and lending guidance the Task Force is actively drafting). Core antifraud provisions, Section 17(a) of the Securities Act and Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act, were never on the table for repeal; they are generally applicable statutes that cover crypto the same way they cover any other asset class, which is exactly why the SEC could dismiss registration theories against Coinbase and Kraken while still charging Sun’s Rainberry entity under Section 17(a)(3) in the same calendar year.

What has genuinely changed is the theory of liability the agency reaches for by default. Under Gensler, an exchange listing a token the SEC considered unregistered was itself a viable target for a lawsuit. Under Atkins, that theory needs an actual victim, a misrepresentation, or missing client assets to get real traction. A token listing alone, absent fraud, is now something the Task Force wants addressed through the rulemaking described above, not a subpoena.

What Comes Next

The enforcement docket for the rest of 2026 will be shaped almost as much by Congress as by the Commission. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would formally divide crypto oversight between the SEC and CFTC, has passed the House, cleared the Senate Banking Committee, and sat on the Senate’s general calendar since mid-2026, but as of late July it still lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats; Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul are expected to vote no from opposite directions, and so far only Democrats Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland have indicated support, both with conditions attached, leaving Majority Leader John Thune needing roughly seven more Democratic votes before the chamber’s planned August recess. HOGE Wire has tracked how that legislative timeline intersects with crypto’s broader macro calendar elsewhere. If the CLARITY Act passes, it would lock much of the SEC’s current enforcement posture into statute, making it harder for a future Commission to simply reverse course the way Atkins reversed Gensler.

Until then, Peirce’s Crypto Task Force says it remains in the second phase of its public roundtable process, having met stakeholders across ten cities through the end of 2025 after an initial spring 2025 series in Washington, and it continues issuing guidance on specific product categories, including a July 2026 statement addressing crypto lending and yield-generating vault structures. The rulemaking side of Project Crypto is expected to produce formal proposals later in 2026 covering exchange definitions and broker-dealer treatment of on-chain trading interfaces. Whichever of those proposals actually gets published, the fraud docket examined above is not waiting on any of it. Ponzi schemes and fake trading bots will keep getting charged under existing law regardless of how the market-structure rulemaking turns out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the SEC stop enforcing crypto laws in 2026?

No. The SEC dismissed or closed more than a dozen registration-focused cases and investigations against exchanges and token issuers between February and May 2025, but it kept filing fraud cases throughout 2025 and into 2026, including actions over fake trading bots and Ponzi-style schemes. Cornerstone Research counted 13 crypto-related SEC actions in 2025, eight of them filed after the leadership change and mostly alleging fraud rather than unregistered securities offerings.

What happened to the SEC’s case against Ripple?

A federal judge ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million penalty and imposed an injunction against future unregistered institutional sales in August 2024. In 2025, the SEC and Ripple tried to jointly ask the judge to release $75 million of that penalty and lift the injunction; she declined, and both sides then dropped their cross-appeals, leaving the original $125 million penalty and injunction in place.

Why did the SEC drop its lawsuits against Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance?

The Commission described the dismissals as a discretionary policy reset under new leadership, meant to correct what it called a regulation-by-enforcement approach that used litigation instead of rulemaking to decide which tokens counted as securities. Critics, including SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw and several members of Congress, have argued the dismissals went beyond policy correction and raised conflict-of-interest concerns given the same companies’ political donations.

Is crypto fraud still prosecuted by the SEC in 2026?

Yes. The SEC has continued charging individuals over crypto-related Ponzi schemes, fake AI trading bots, and misleading investor representations throughout 2025 and 2026, and it pursued officer-and-director bars against former FTX and Alameda Research executives as recently as December 2025. Fraud allegations, rather than registration violations, remain the agency’s primary basis for new crypto cases.

What is the SEC’s Crypto Task Force?

The Crypto Task Force is a group formed in January 2025 under then-Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda and led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, tasked with developing a clearer regulatory framework for digital assets through public roundtables and rulemaking recommendations rather than case-by-case litigation. It has held stakeholder meetings across the United States through 2025 and continues issuing guidance on topics such as staking and crypto lending into 2026.

By the HOGE Wire policy desk.