PANews reported on August 13 that DeFi Education Fund and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) submitted a proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), calling for the creation of a regulatory safe harbor for blockchain applications to clarify the scope of application of their rules as brokers.
The proposal states that applications eligible for the safe harbor must be non-custodial, not provide advice or exercise trading decisions, and the underlying protocol must be decentralized. This move is intended to provide developers with necessary regulatory clarity while ensuring the SEC's continued oversight of high-risk activities. The SEC has previously investigated blockchain applications such as Uniswap, Coinbase Wallet, and OpenSea, but some of these cases have been dismissed.