SEC: No need to publish quarterly reports anymore; IPOs will become more and more like ICOs.

Today, the SEC released a proposal: U.S. publicly traded companies can choose to report financials semi-annually instead of quarterly.

Companies can opt to continue submitting Form 10-Q quarterly reports or choose the new Form 10-S semi-annual reports, with the annual 10-K remaining unchanged.

If they choose to submit semi-annual reports, the total number of regular reports per year will be reduced from four to two.

In the next 60 days, this proposal will enter the public comment period; if there are no significant objections, it will be officially approved in the second half of the year.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has positioned this reform as part of his “Make IPOs Great Again” agenda, aiming to reduce compliance burdens for going public and staying listed, and to encourage more companies to enter and remain in the public markets.

Because the costs of listing are increasing, the number of U.S. listed companies has nearly halved over the past few decades: in the 1990s, there were 7,800 listed companies, now only about 4,700.

Previously, companies would IPO at Series B/C rounds, but now many delay until Series E or later.

Currently, in the hot AI sector, three companies have reached a valuation of over a trillion dollars in private funding rounds before preparing for an IPO…

Isn’t this just turning U.S. stock investors into the final bagholders?

So SEC couldn’t sit still (since only after IPO can SEC collect fees) and launched the “Make IPOs Great Again” plan, which basically encourages projects to go public as early as possible.

Specifically, besides simplifying financial reports, there are other measures, such as:

• Redefining “qualified investors” — anyone who passes a specific financial literacy test or holds relevant professional licenses (like CFA, CPA, or industry experience) can be considered qualified investors without needing to prove a million-dollar net worth.

• Allowing companies to make more forward-looking forecasts about their business prospects in registration statements and semi-annual reports, as long as sufficient risk disclosures are included, protecting management from large class-action lawsuits over “missed expectations.”

Under SEC Chairman Paul Atkins’s plan, cryptocurrencies will also be an important part of the future.

For example, the SEC will establish a “fast track” allowing issuers to get feedback within 30 days on whether their assets qualify as securities.

With on-chain securities compliance, SEC-led IPOs will increasingly resemble ICOs, and the path for projects to go public might look like this:

1. Submit a simplified prospectus (white paper)

2. Issue tokenized equity simultaneously after IPO

3. List on the stock exchange afterward

The original reason for the crypto industry to do ICOs was that IPOs were too expensive and slow, making it impossible to proceed.

Now, the SEC has not only lowered capital costs but also reduced compliance costs, effectively killing ICOs with a combination of measures.

In the future, crypto exchanges might just become the offshore distribution channels for U.S. stocks.