With a signature from President Donald Trump, the decentralized financial (DeFi) corner of the crypto sector is now freed from U.S. Internal Revenue Service demands that such platforms be treated as brokers and required to track and report user activity.

That narrowly focused IRS rule, approved in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration, has been formally struck down, according to Representative Mike Carey, an Ohio Republican who backed the effort. And the agency is prevented from pursuing anything like it, according to the Congressional Review Act power used by lawmakers to get rid of the tax regulation.

Though the issue was relatively limited, its completion marks the first time a pro-crypto effort has cleared the U.S. Congress.

Both the Senate and House of Representatives agreed to reverse the IRS action with strong bipartisan showings, further underlining the crypto sector’s strength in this Congress. That could bode well for the industry’s chances with other more wide-ranging matters, including legislation to regulate stablecoin issuers and to set market rules for crypto transactions.

Trump’s signature on the DeFi tax resolution puts that concern for DeFi in the rearview. The next crypto priority in Congress has been stablecoin legislation. Similar bills have passed relevant committees in both the House and Senate and are awaiting floor votes in each chamber. Approvals would start a process to meld the two efforts into one compromise version.

The president has called for a bill to arrive on his desk by August, and the lawmakers behind the legislation have said such a timeline is still possible.

Nova Labs, the parent company behind the Helium blockchain, has agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $200,000 to settle civil securities fraud charges the regulator filed against the firm in January, a court filing said Thursday.

Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle accusations that it misled institutional investors during a funding round from late 2021 to early 2022, during which it raised $200 million in fresh capital at a $1 billion valuation. In its complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs of lying to prospective investors about a number of big-name enterprise customers — including Nestle, Salesforce and Lime — it claimed were using the Helium technology.

The SEC accused Nova Labs of repeatedly exaggerating the nature of its relationships with these three corporations in order to secure investments, touting them as customers and “users” of its tech. According to the complaint, Nova Labs’ actual contact with Lime, Salesforce and Nestle was limited and primarily occurred before the launch of the Helium network in mid-2019.

For example, according to the SEC, the extent of Nestle’s relationship with Nova Labs was a small-scale test of some of the company’s component hardware in its water-delivery business in 2018, before Nova Labs was even in the crypto business. Its relationship with scooter company Lime was limited to two in-person demonstrations of Nova Labs’ component hardware to an audience of just two Lime employees — at least one of whom left the company shortly afterwards —in early 2019, the SEC said.

Both Nestle and Lime eventually sent Nova Labs cease-and-desist orders, according to the SEC, threatening the company with legal action if it continued to use their trademarks and otherwise claiming to have an ongoing relationship with them, the complaint alleged.

As part of Nova Labs’ settlement agreement with the SEC, the regulator agreed to drop two other claims that the company violated federal securities laws, including through the sale of three of its tokens — the Helium Network Token (HNT), the Helium Mobile Network Token (MOBILE) and the Helium IoT Network Token (IOT) — which the SEC alleged in January to be securities, according the settlement agreement. Those claims were dropped with prejudice, meaning the SEC is barred from bringing a future case under the same allegations.

Nova Labs celebrated the settlement in a Thursday blog post, calling it a “major win for Helium and the People’s Network.”

“With this dismissal, we can now definitively say that all compatible Helium Hotspots and the distribution of HNT, IOT and MOBILE tokens through the Helium Network are not securities,” the blog post said. “The outcome establishes that selling hardware and distributing tokens for network growth does not automatically make them securities in the eyes of the SEC.”

The blog post made no mention of the $200,000 settlement or the claim that Nova Labs misled investors.

When reached for comment, Nova Labs Chief Legal Officer Sarah Aberg told CoinDesk that while the settlement agreement prohibits the company from either admitting or denying the claims, “we can point out that, both at the time of those statements and today, data usage on the Helium Network has always been publicly available.”

The settlement agreement, filed in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) on Thursday, is subject to approval by a federal judge.

Crypto companies issuing or dealing with tokens that may be securities should provide detailed disclosures, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said on Thursday.

The SEC published its latest staff statement on disclosures ahead of its second roundtable — which will focus on trading — «as part of an effort to provide greater clarity on the application of the federal securities laws to crypto assets.»

The nonbinding guidance recommends companies filing disclosures be precise about what their businesses do and what role their tokens may play in those ventures. Much of it is based on observations about what companies have previously disclosed, the statement said. The statement did not delve deeply into which cryptocurrencies are being defined as securities or what definitive guidance on that issue may look like.

«These offerings and registrations may involve equity or debt securities of issuers whose operations relate to networks, applications, and/or crypto assets. These offerings and registrations also may relate to crypto assets offered as part of or subject to an investment contract (such a crypto asset, a ‘subject crypto asset’),» the statement said.

Many of the details include disclosures made by existing companies that the SEC said it observed, including whether the businesses are developing crypto or blockchain networks, their development milestones, what the network would be for and whether it was based on open source or other technology stacks.

Previous disclosures also include details like what rights token holders have and technical specifications, the statement said.

The statement said the Division of Corporation Finance was just providing its views ahead of the SEC’s new crypto task force’s work to more clearly define where its jurisdiction lies in the digital asset sector. A footnote, like previous staff statements, noted that the statement is not formal guidance or rulemaking and «has no legal force or effect.»

Previous staff statements issued under Acting Chair Mark Uyeda addressed stablecoins and memecoins.

Read more: SEC Staff to Reassess Biden-Era Crypto Guidance Amid Regulatory Shakeup