What happened
The Hyperliquid Policy Center, the policy arm aligned with the Hyperliquid perpetuals venue, filed a formal comment letter with the SEC on Monday urging revisions to five sections of the agency's pending crypto rulemaking package, per Crypto. News. The letter calls for carve-outs that would treat qualifying airdrops as non-securities distributions, narrow the definition of a securities transaction for secondary token trading on registered venues, create an explicit lane for protocol-level token buybacks funded by on-chain revenue, extend a conditional developer safe harbor for code published to open repositories, and bar the SEC's rules from overriding state-level consumer protection regimes already on the books.
The group filed the comment during the SEC's open rulemaking window and said it will seek a meeting with the agency's Division of Trading and Markets. The filing lands two weeks after the SEC's most recent crypto roundtable, where Hyperliquid-affiliated counsel first signaled the five-point agenda. It is one of the few comment letters this cycle to run through the proposed rule section by section rather than offering a general industry statement.
Why it matters
The SEC's next tranche of crypto guidance is expected to set the ground rules for how U. S. venues handle token launches, listings, and treasury operations for the next several years.
The Hyperliquid Policy Center is trying to pre-empt that drafting cycle rather than litigate it later. Its airdrop ask alone would be a material shift: the current draft language treats most token distributions tied to prior platform usage as potential investment contracts, which has already pushed several 2025 and 2026 airdrops to geoblock U. S.