SEC Chairman Paul Atkins's recent pronouncements at the Blockchain Association's annual policy summit mark a significant, functional-based inflection point in the regulatory treatment of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), dramatically refining and narrowing the scope of the SEC's jurisdiction over digital assets. Atkins explicitly stated that many types of ICOs should be regarded as non-securities transactions and, consequently, fall outside the regulatory purview of the Wall Street regulator a position he encourages to foster innovation in the U.S. market. This distinction is anchored in the Token Taxonomy framework he unveiled last month, which formally divides crypto assets into four main categories. He clarified that ICOs involving three of these token types—Network Tokens (or Digital Commodities, tied to decentralized protocol function), Digital Collectibles (like NFTs), and Digital Utilities (tokens granting practical access or function) should not be treated as securities offerings because their value is not derived from the 'essential managerial efforts of others' for profit, the core element of the Howey Test. . Conversely, Atkins stressed that the only category of tokens the SEC should regulate concerning ICOs are Tokenized Securities, which are digital, on-chain representations of financial instruments already defined and regulated as securities (such as tokenized stocks or bonds). By delineating this clear division, the Chairman effectively ceded jurisdiction over the three non-security categories, stating that they primarily fall under the mandate of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which regulates commodities and their derivatives. This strategic pivot moves the SEC away from a broad "regulation by enforcement" stance to a structured, predictable, function-based rulebook, offering much-needed legal certainty to developers and participants in the rapidly evolving digital asset space.