New Delhi: On August 18, the US Securities and Exchange Commission did something India’s regulators have circled around for years but never quite done: it proposed an actual rulebook for crypto assets.
The SEC calls it “Regulation Crypto Assets.” Strip away the legal language, and the idea is straightforward. Instead of forcing every crypto project into securities laws designed for stocks and bonds, the SEC wants to create a separate lane, one built around how crypto actually raises money, builds networks and operates.
The details matter. Under the proposed framework, startups could raise up to $5 million once over four years with relatively light disclosure requirements, or raise up to $75 million a year under a somewhat heavier disclosure regime. The proposal also provides a safe harbor for crypto projects. Once a project has done what it promised, built the network, handed over control and stopped being “essential” to its own token, regulators would stop treating that token as an investment contract. The rule also takes aim at state-level red tape by preempting overlapping state securities registration requirements.
None of this amounts to deregulation. The SEC Chairman has been careful to frame it as clarity within guardrails, not a free pass. But it is, unmistakably, an attempt to stop pushing crypto builders offshore and start bringing them back onshore, with rules they can actually understand and plan around.
India’s relationship with crypto, by contrast, has been defined by ambiguity dressed up as caution. There is no dedicated regulator, while the Reserve Bank of India has remained publicly wary of the asset class for years. The Finance Ministry taxes crypto gains at a flat 30%, with a 1% TDS on every transaction, a structure that has contributed to a sharp decline in trading volumes on domestic exchanges without banning crypto outright.
The result is a familiar Indian pattern: talented builders, real capital and technological capability, but enough regulatory fog that both increasingly choose to incorporate in Dubai or Singapore instead. The US now seems to be trying to close exactly that gap for itself. India should watch closely, because it has more in common with pre-reform America than it might like to admit.
There is also a quieter signal in how the SEC has approached this. It did not try to regulate all of crypto in one sweep, with trading, lending, custody and issuance bundled together. Instead, it picked a narrower target: how investment contracts involving crypto assets get offered and disclosed. Everything else waits its turn. That kind of sequencing, regulating in layers instead of trying to solve everything at once, is worth studying by anyone drafting rules from scratch.
The most useful lesson is not the dollar thresholds or the disclosure formats; those are American numbers for an American market. It is the underlying design choice: build activity-based rules instead of one blanket law, calibrate disclosure to how much money and risk is actually involved, and give builders a genuine, achievable path to eventually operate outside securities law once the risk that justified regulating them in the first place has passed.
The US is not done. This is a proposal, open for public comment for 60 days, and it could easily be watered down or delayed. But the direction is the signal. Washington has decided that ambiguity is now more expensive than regulation. India is still deciding. It should not take much longer to reach the same conclusion.
