The Aave Labs, Kamino, and Veda submission to the SEC acknowledges that vault curators who make investment decisions involving securities may still qualify as investment advisers under federal law despite not taking custody of user assets

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Digital Asset requested no-action relief for Canton Coin in a letter to the SEC

SEC Deputy Chief Counsel Jonathan Ingram noted the Canton Coin no-action letter represents a staff enforcement position based on specific facts, not a binding legal conclusion or legal ruling on Canton Coin's security status

The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance issued a no-action letter to Digital Asset stating it will not recommend enforcement action regarding the programmatic issuance of Canton Coin without securities registration

The SEC staff classified Canton Coin as a digital commodity, citing Canton Network's lack of a central controlling party to drive value and automated network operation and supply-and-demand dynamics rather than third-party managerial profit expectations

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SEC met with Aave Labs representatives and Winston & Strawn LLP lawyers to discuss the ERC-4626 vault standard, yield generation, and Aave V4 architecture

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Aave Labs, Kamino Foundation, and Veda Tech Labs Inc. released a public summary of their SEC DeFi legal framework submission

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Aave Labs, Kamino Foundation, and Veda Tech Labs Inc. submitted a paper to the SEC's Crypto Task Force proposing a legal framework for DeFi lending

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A governance proposal sought approval to deploy Aave V4 on Monad featuring a lending hub for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bills

The framework submitted by Aave Labs, Kamino, and Veda to the SEC on October 26, 2026 asserts that DeFi lenders earn interest based on published per-unit rates rather than sharing in collective business profits or relying on central entity promises

The Aave Labs, Kamino, and Veda framework paper asserts that decentralized lending markets can continue operating under existing code rules even if a DAO stops making governance decisions

The Aave, Kamino, and Veda legal framework paper submitted to the SEC highlights that mandatory public notice and time delays for DAO governance changes allow users to withdraw assets before new protocol rules take effect

The legal paper submitted by Aave, Kamino, and Veda to the SEC argues that non-custodial vault users retain direct ownership of deposited assets despite limited allocation choices made by curators

Aave Labs, Kamino, and Veda argue that users depositing crypto or borrowing against collateral in DeFi lending protocols do not enter securities arrangements under the Howey test, Reves, the Investment Company Act, or the Investment Advisers Act

An SEC investigation into the Aave protocol opened around 2021 concluded in December 2025 without any enforcement recommendation

Equity perpetual futures are classified as security futures products, requiring exchanges to hold a Commodity Futures Trading Commission contract market registration and a notice registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission

The November 2, 2026 SEC staff guidance on governance tokens reduces regulatory uncertainty for decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, potentially encouraging exchanges and institutional investors to engage with qualifying governance tokens

In May 2025, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staff issued non-binding guidance stating that protocol staking generally does not involve securities, though Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw publicly dissented from that position

In June 2023, 145,270 New Jersey residents were using Coinbase's staking service when the New Jersey Bureau of Securities alleged that the service constituted an unregistered security

Operating without central control can qualify a cryptocurrency as a digital commodity rather than a security, subjecting it to different regulatory requirements

Andreessen Horowitz, Uniswap Labs, and the DeFi Education Fund requested that Illinois regulators explicitly exclude decentralized protocols, interfaces, and automated fee collectors from the definition of digital asset brokers.