Inside Project Crypto: Why MLRT Is Built for the Token Taxonomy Era

Source reviewed: Chairman Paul S. Atkins — "The SEC's Approach to Digital Assets: Inside Project Crypto" (November 12, 2025).

In November 2025, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins gave a follow-up speech to the July 2025 Project Crypto announcement. The new speech, delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, did something the agency had been avoiding for a decade: it sketched a working taxonomy of crypto assets and said which ones were not securities.

For Malairt (MLRT) — a Bitcoin-style proof-of-work coin with no premine, no ICO, no foundation, and CPU/GPU mineable from genesis — the taxonomy lands the network squarely in the easy bucket: a digital commodity tied to the operation of a functional, decentralized network.

The four categories

Atkins outlined four working categories, each with its own securities-law treatment:

1. Digital commodities, also called "network tokens." Their value is derived from the functioning of a decentralized crypto system. Under the taxonomy, these are not securities.
2. Digital collectibles. Designed to be collected and used. Not securities.
3. Digital tools. Provide a practical function. Not securities.
4. Tokenized securities. Represent ownership of an existing financial instrument that is being maintained on a crypto network. These are, and continue to be, securities.

The first category is where MLRT belongs. Bitcoin belongs there. A small handful of other born-mined chains belong there. The category is defined functionally: a token whose value is intrinsic to a decentralized network's operation, not a claim on someone's enterprise.

A second move: investment contracts can expire

Atkins's speech made a second move that is worth its own paragraph. He pushed back on the assumption — common among prosecutors and academics during the prior administration — that once a token had been sold inside an investment contract, it remained a security forever.

Paraphrased: investment contracts can be performed and they can expire. They do not last forever simply because the object of an investment contract continues to trade on a blockchain.

That matters for projects that started with a fundraising round and want to argue, years later, that their network is now decentralized enough that the original investment contract has run its course. It matters less for MLRT, because MLRT was never inside an investment contract to begin with. There was no fundraising. There was no promoter selling tokens with promises about future development. The first MLRT was mined.

But the principle still helps the MLRT category as a whole. It cements the lifecycle view: a token's status under federal securities law follows the network's functional reality, not a permanent label assigned at birth.

Why MLRT is a clean digital commodity

A digital commodity, in Atkins's framing, is a token whose value comes from the functional, decentralized network it lives on — not from the entrepreneurial efforts of an identifiable third party. Walk through the criteria for MLRT:

• Functional network. MLRT runs on malairte-node, an open-source Bitcoin-style implementation. Blocks are produced every two minutes. UTXOs are spent and created with standard cryptographic signatures. The network does what the protocol says it does.
• Decentralized network. No foundation. No premine. No central operator. Nodes are independent. Mining is open to anyone with a CPU or GPU. Software upgrades require rough consensus among independent operators.
• Value tied to network use. MLRT's value is intrinsic to the network — for fees, for transaction settlement, for the security budget that pays miners.
• No identifiable promoter whose efforts the holder relies on. There is no team to depend on, because there is no team in the Howey sense. The protocol is the protocol.

That fact pattern is precisely what the taxonomy describes when it says digital commodities are not securities.

Why the taxonomy is good for the broader market

The absence of a taxonomy was, for years, the single biggest source of regulatory friction in US crypto. Every project had to argue from first principles whether its token was inside or outside the SEC's reach, and the agency would not say in advance. The result was a body of case law assembled out of enforcement actions, with no structural map.

A published taxonomy changes the conversation. Projects can self-classify and design accordingly. Developers can build for one of the four categories rather than trying to evade all of them. Lawyers can give cleaner advice. Exchanges can list with less ambiguity. Users can read a taxonomy and understand what they hold.

For MLRT specifically, the taxonomy's value is mostly confirmatory. The network was already designed to fit the digital-commodity category. The taxonomy makes that fit legible to a regulator, an exchange compliance team, or a US user trying to understand what category MLRT is in.

The pieces of MLRT that map to the taxonomy

It is worth being concrete about which design decisions push MLRT into the digital-commodity bucket:

Each row is a property the taxonomy looks for in a digital commodity. MLRT was built to satisfy the whole list.

What the taxonomy does not do

It is worth being careful about what an SEC speech does and does not do:

• It is not a rule. Until a notice-and-comment rulemaking is final, the taxonomy is the Chair's articulation of where the agency is going.
• It is not an endorsement of any particular project. The agency identifies categories, not winners.
• It does not preempt state law. State money-transmission rules and consumer-protection rules continue to apply to specific business models.
• It does not change tax treatment. Mining income remains taxable; capital gains remain capital gains.

Within those caveats, though, the taxonomy is a meaningful step. It is the first time in years that an SEC Chair has said in a speech, with this clarity, that a defined category of crypto assets is not under the agency's securities-law jurisdiction.

What this means for MLRT users

• MLRT is structured to fit the digital-commodity / network-token category described in the November 2025 taxonomy.
• The "investment contracts can expire" principle strengthens the broader framework MLRT lives inside, even though MLRT was never inside such a contract.
• Continue to maintain the network's open and decentralized character — independent nodes, distributed mining, transparent software releases.
• Speeches are direction, not law. Watch the actual rulemakings as Project Crypto matures, but the direction is consistent with how MLRT was built.

References

• The SEC's Approach to Digital Assets: Inside Project Crypto — Chairman Paul S. Atkins, 2025-11-12

This article is editorial commentary published by the Malairte project. It is not legal or investment advice and does not represent the views of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or any of its staff or commissioners.