The SEC's Crypto Custody Rewrite Reaches the White House

The SEC's rewrite of the custody rules governing investment advisers and funds — including their crypto assets — entered White House review on 25 August, beginning pre-publication scrutiny of an economically significant proposal.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs lists the "Amendments to the Custody Rules" as pending at the proposed-rule stage, with no legal deadline. OIRA coordinates Executive Branch review of significant draft regulations before an agency publishes them.

Where it sits in the process

The receipt advances the rulemaking; publication and Commission consideration still lie ahead. The Unified Agenda lists October 2026 as the target for a notice of proposed rulemaking — an agency planning date rather than a binding one.

The substance remains undisclosed. What is known is the scope: changes to how registered investment advisers and investment companies hold client and fund assets, crypto included.

Why custody is the load-bearing rule

Advisers and funds are closest to this because their custody arrangements depend on institutions that meet a specific legal definition of a qualified custodian. That definition was written for securities and cash held in accounts, and applying it to an asset controlled by a private key has been the central unresolved question of institutional crypto.

Everything else follows from it. What a fund can hold, who can hold it, and what an auditor will sign off on all trace back to whether a given arrangement counts.

Which is why the rewrite matters more than its procedural status suggests — and why the industry will spend the next months arguing about a text nobody outside the process has read.