Treat this section, more than any other in the module, as dated to 2026-07 and perishable, regulatory frameworks for digital assets are moving faster than almost any other area this program covers, and every claim below is anchored to a specific, named, dateable primary document precisely so you can re-check it rather than trust this page indefinitely.
How is crypto regulated in the US?
United States. The SEC evaluates tokens case-by-case under the Howey test (see types of crypto tokens), and its own conduct in the highest-profile approval to date is worth reading in the primary source rather than the headline. On 10 January 2024 the SEC approved the listing and trading of the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products. Chair Gary Gensler's own statement is unusually blunt for a regulator's approval notice, and worth quoting directly because it is a near-perfect, real-world instance of "the primary source is more sober than the headline that summarized it": "While we approved the listing and trading of certain spot bitcoin ETP shares today, we did not approve or endorse bitcoin", describing bitcoin itself as "primarily a speculative, volatile asset" also used for "illicit activity including ransomware, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and terrorist financing." A learner who only reads "SEC approves Bitcoin ETFs" headlines misses that the approving regulator went out of its way, in the same document, to say it was not endorsing the underlying asset, read the primary statement, every time, not the paraphrase. On the stablecoin side, the GENIUS Act, signed into law on 18 July 2025, establishes the first dedicated federal framework for "payment stablecoins": issuers must hold reserves at least 1:1 against outstanding tokens (cash and short-dated Treasuries, with no rehypothecation, reserves cannot be re-lent or re-pledged), must publish monthly public reserve-composition reports, are restricted to three permitted issuer categories (a subsidiary of an insured depository institution, an OCC-approved nonbank, or a state-approved issuer meeting comparable standards, with a $10 billion size threshold separating primarily-federal from primarily-state oversight), and, a provision worth underlining because it directly targets the Anchor-Protocol-style dynamic behind Terra's collapse, issuers are explicitly barred from paying any yield or interest on payment stablecoins.
Advertisement
How is crypto regulated in India?
India. As established in types of crypto tokens, there is no dedicated securities-law crypto framework; the operative regime runs through three separate statutes. Taxation: the Finance Act, 2022 inserted Section 115BBH into the Income-tax Act, 1961 (from tax year 2026-27 the Income-tax Act, 2025 carries the same rules under its corresponding provisions; as of October 2026), a flat 30% tax on income from the transfer of "Virtual Digital Assets" (VDAs), with no deduction permitted except the cost of acquisition, and critically, no set-off of a VDA loss against any gain (VDA or otherwise) and no carry-forward of VDA losses to future years, a materially harsher design than ordinary capital-gains netting, worked in full arithmetic in Worked example 2. The same Act inserted Section 194S, a 1% tax-deducted-at-source (TDS) obligation on the consideration for a VDA transfer, effective 1 July 2022, withheld regardless of whether the underlying trade was profitable. Anti-money-laundering: a Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002 notification dated 7 March 2023 brought five categories of VDA-related activity (fiat-VDA exchange, VDA-VDA exchange, VDA transfer, safekeeping/administration, and participation in VDA-issuance financial services) within the Act's "reporting entity" obligations, requiring registration with the Financial Intelligence Unit-India (FIU-IND) and standard KYC/reporting duties. Banking access, resolved: the RBI's 6 April 2018 circular had directed regulated entities to cease providing banking services to crypto-related businesses; the Supreme Court of India quashed that circular in Internet and Mobile Association of India v. Reserve Bank of India on 4 March 2020, restoring banking access. One deliberate non-overlap: the RBI's own e₹ (Digital Rupee), a sovereign central-bank liability, first described in the RBI's Concept Note of 7 October 2022, with wholesale (e₹-W) and retail (e₹-R) pilots launched 1 November 2022 and 1 December 2022 respectively, is a categorically different instrument from any privately issued crypto-asset discussed in this module: it is a central-bank liability, not a market-priced, market-risk-bearing token. MS1.04 owns the full monetary-plumbing treatment of CBDCs; this module's job is only to make sure you never conflate the two.
What do global standard-setters say?
Global standard-setters. IOSCO (the global standard-setter for securities regulators) finalized its Policy Recommendations for Crypto and Digital Asset Markets in November 2023, covering conflicts of interest, market manipulation, cross-border risk, custody and client-asset protection, operational risk, and retail-distribution suitability, followed by companion Policy Recommendations for Decentralized Finance in December 2023. BIS's Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures, jointly with IOSCO, published a consultative report in October 2021 and finalized guidance on 13 July 2022 applying the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures to systemically important stablecoin arrangements, the standard-setters' own answer to "should a stablecoin that gets large enough be regulated like payment infrastructure," and their answer is yes. The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) applied its stablecoin-specific provisions (e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens) from 30 June 2024, with the remaining crypto-asset-service-provider licensing regime applying fully from 30 December 2024, the most comprehensive dedicated crypto framework any major jurisdiction had adopted as of this writing.
Why do these rules go out of date?
Perishable specifics, as of 2026-07; verify current. Every date, threshold, and provision above is a snapshot. Regulatory frameworks in this asset class change fastest of anywhere in this program: US federal crypto-market-structure legislation beyond the GENIUS Act's stablecoin scope was, as of this writing, still actively moving through Congress and should be checked fresh; India's tax provisions and PMLA scope are set by ordinary legislative and executive action and can change with any Finance Act; MiCA's technical standards continue to be issued by European regulators after the headline dates above. Treat every regulatory claim in this section, yours, an AI tool's, or this document's, as requiring a Guardrail Date-check against the regulator's own current publication before it enters real work.