Hot off the heels of his NYSE address, SEC chair lays out his vision for the Commission in 2026 and beyond
On December 2, 2025, SEC chairman Paul Atkins rang the opening bell at the NYSE and delivered a keynote address titled Revitalizing America’s markets at 250. In a sweeping vision for the future of US capital markets, he argued the rules that over decades have piled up around public companies have made going public costlier and more burdensome – causing the number of listed firms to decline by roughly 40 percent since the mid-1990s.
Atkins painted the exchanges not merely as financial plumbing but as the locus of human ambition and national identity: markets should allocate capital ‘toward socially valued uses’ and reflect a spirit of enterprise, risk-taking and shared prosperity.
What’s coming in 2026?
A centerpiece of Atkins’ agenda is sweeping reform of disclosure requirements – especially for smaller and recently public companies. He said that decades of incremental rulemaking ‘produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate’.
Under his plan, the Commission will:
- Root all disclosure obligations in the concept of financial materiality so that companies only have to report information the SEC views as most relevant to investors
- Scale disclosure requirements according to a company’s size and maturity, rather than treating a small cap with a modest public float the same as a giant multinational
- Revamp executive compensation disclosures in particular – junking the overly broad templates that often force companies to disclose non-material data, a process that critics say has ‘ballooned’ proxy statements from a few dozen to hundreds of pages, without improving investor insight.
Atkins also proposed expanding what was once an ‘IPO on-ramp’ under the JOBS Act, allowing newly public companies to remain on lighter-touch disclosure rules for several years, rather than forcing full compliance after a single year.
Taken together, these reforms – along with updated definitions of company size and disclosure thresholds – are designed to make going public more feasible for smaller and younger firms. Atkins said one of the key aims is to revive public capital formation and ensure access to equity markets is not reserved only for a handful of mega-cap ‘unicorns’.
He characterized the effort as one of ‘three pillars’ to ‘make IPOs great again’. The first pillar is disclosure reform; the second is de-politicizing shareholder meetings and refocusing them on core business matters (such as board elections and major corporate decisions); the third is reforming the often-hostile litigation environment around securities lawsuits, with a view to reducing frivolous claims while preserving genuine investor protections.
If implemented, these reforms could re-open the public markets to a broader group of companies and help reverse the long-term decline in listings that has hollowed out the variety of publicly traded firms, according to Atkins.
A new era for cryptocurrency
Atkins did not limit his vision to traditional public companies. In an interview the same day on CNBC’s Squawk Box, he confirmed that the SEC plans to publish its long-promised ‘innovation exemption’ for cryptocurrency firms – likely by January 2026.
The news follows on from Atkin’s Project Crypto, an initiative designed to position the US as the global leader in digital finance, in collaboration with various government entities, including the SEC’s Crypto Task Force and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
‘I’m looking forward to having an innovation exemption that we’ve been talking about now. We’ll be able to get that out in a month or so, is what I’m hoping,’ he said.
He explained that delays caused by the recent government shutdown slowed progress, but emphasized the SEC is now ‘on track’ to roll out the framework.
Under this new exemption, crypto firms may be granted temporary regulatory relief, allowing them to launch on-chain products more easily, without immediately facing the full weight of securities-law disclosure and compliance burdens.
Atkins described this shift as marking the end of what he called the ‘regulation by enforcement’ era for crypto companies. Instead of relying on retrospective investigations and enforcement actions, the SEC under his leadership will favor clear rules, advance guidance and proportionate regulation.
He underscored that the aim is not to abdicate oversight but to give crypto firms a predictable regulatory path – something he sees as enabling the US to rebuild its competitive edge in blockchain innovation while still safeguarding investors and preserving market integrity.
What does this all mean?
Atkins’ NYSE speech and his CNBC interview together mark a clear break with the last two decades of ever-thickening regulation. The central core of his agenda is simplification, scalability and modernization – matching regulatory obligations to a firm’s size, maturity and business model, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all regime.
For small or growing companies, his reforms could lower the cost and complexity of going public – potentially increasing the number and diversity of IPOs in 2026 and beyond. For crypto firms, the forthcoming innovation exemption could finally lend regulatory certainty and make the US more hospitable to digital-asset innovation.
That said, success will depend heavily on how the reforms are crafted in detail – how ‘materiality’ is defined, how thresholds are set, what limitations apply to exempted crypto activities and whether Congress backs the changes the SEC proposes.
As Atkins said at the close of his speech: our capital markets are ‘more than the mechanisms of finance… they are, at their core, expressions of our national character’.
