The crypto industry is currently in a transitional zone between the third and fourth phases. After Bitcoin's inception, a small group of developers verified its potential for payment and settlement (experimental phase). In the 2017 ICO craze and the 2021 DeFi wave, investors repeatedly flooded in and then exited (overheating phase). The collapse of FTX in 2022 was both a peak and a turning point. After multiple rounds of shakeouts, speculative demand was filtered out, real use cases were verified, and U.S. regulators began shifting toward formalization rather than laissez-faire or suppression (regulatory intervention phase).

Since the crypto industry attempts to directly replace core financial functions such as settlement, payment, and issuance, it has generated greater friction with traditional financial institutions, and thus it takes longer to be absorbed. Today, the crypto industry has finally reached the intersection of regulatory intervention and industrial formation.

Progress at the regulatory level has been significant. The U.S. Congress passed the GENIUS Act, clarifying the legal status of stablecoins. In March 2026, the SEC and CFTC issued joint interpretive guidance, identifying 16 assets including Solana (SOL) as digital commodities, dividing assets into five categories, abandoning the old "security/non-security" binary classification, and formally excluding protocol staking from securities law regulation.