Crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, and Bittrex form the Crypto Ratings Council to rate digital assets on whether they are securities
Dave Michaels / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2019, Coinbase had spent two years chasing regulatory cover: sources reported talks with the SEC about registering as a licensed broker and trading venue, and the exchange said SEC and FINRA had cleared it to list coins deemed securities through acquisitions including Keystone Capital. What the industry still lacked was any official answer to the underlying question — which tokens are securities at all.
First-order effects
- The four member exchanges now share a single scoring framework for listing decisions, so a token rated a security on one venue faces consistent treatment across Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, and Bittrex rather than venue-by-venue judgment calls.
Second-order effects
- Token issuers gain a new gatekeeper: a low securities score becomes the practical path to broad US listing access, giving the Council pricing power over projects that once shopped only for exchange fees.
- Non-member exchanges must either adopt the Council's methodology or explain why their listings diverge from the industry's new de facto standard.
Third-order effects
- The Council is self-regulation filling a vacuum the SEC has not filled, and the pattern holds: Armstrong later committed Coinbase to listing every asset where legal, backed by its own ratings system, and by 2024 exchanges were running risk assessments and finance tests for UK users ahead of ad-rule enforcement.
The trend: Crypto exchanges are building private compliance and rating infrastructure wherever regulators decline to define which digital assets are securities.