SEC custody-rule rewrite enters White House review

The SEC's rewrite of how investment advisers and funds hold client assets, including crypto, has reached the White House for pre-publication review. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) logged "Amendments to the Custody Rules," RIN 3235-AN46, as received on August 25, 2026. Read the stage correctly: this is a proposed rule under executive-order review, not a final rule and not yet open for public comment.

What the record actually says

The OIRA entry is thin by design, but every field on it is load-bearing. Stage of rulemaking: Proposed Rule. Legal deadline: None. Economically Significant: Yes. That last flag is the one to weigh. Under Executive Order 12866, "economically significant" means OIRA expects an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more, which triggers a full cost-benefit analysis and, in practice, closer and often longer White House scrutiny before anything publishes.

The Unified Agenda abstract states the need: modernize the custody of advisory client and fund assets, "including to address in each case crypto assets," clarify the framework for crypto-asset custody, and remove burdens from certain outdated provisions. The rewrite runs through the Investment Advisers Act and the Investment Company Act, so it reaches both separately managed adviser accounts and registered funds.

The date the headline leaves out, and what it is not

The agenda lists an NPRM target of October 2026. Treat that as a planning date on an internal timetable, not a binding deadline. With no statutory deadline attached, OIRA can hold the review for weeks or months, or return it to the SEC for changes, and the target slips without consequence.

This also is not a resurrection of the old safeguarding fight. What sits at OIRA today is a fresh proposed rule under chair Paul Atkins, whose SEC has pivoted from regulation-through-enforcement toward writing crypto rules directly. It is part of the administration's broader digital-asset agenda, per CoinTelegraph, and it is the cost-and-compliance side of the same policy shift that produced the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework.

The takeaway

Nothing here is actionable as a compliance change yet, and that is the point: there is no rule text, no comment docket, and no effective date to build against. What a GC or custody-ops lead does now is watch three gates in order. First, the OIRA return, when the review concludes or the entry clears, because that is when the SEC can publish. Second, the NPRM text itself, specifically whether "qualified custodian" is redefined for crypto and what it requires of advisers holding digital assets. Third, the comment window that opens on publication, which is your only formal lever before this becomes binding. Until the first gate moves, this is a signal about direction and timing, not a deadline. The one date to carry is the October NPRM target, and the discipline is to treat it as soft.

For related market context on how forward compute and capital commitments are being structured under the same policy backdrop, see our coverage of Anthropic's $45B Nscale compute lease.