Three people are named at the top of Regulation Crypto Assets as the officials the public should call about it, and one of them is Irene Paik, an Attorney-Advisor in the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Crypto Assets. Her name, her office and the direct number 202-551-2076 sit in the FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT block of the proposing release published in the Federal Register on Friday, August 21, 2026 at 91 FR 54510, document 2026-17183. That block is close to the entire public record of her role, and it is the reason the name is being searched at all.
Phemex covered the October 20 comment deadline itself as a separate story. This one is about the contact block, and about the gap between the person you are pointed at and the docket that actually holds your words.
What the Federal Register Actually Says About Irene Paik
The line is short enough to print in full. The Federal Register text of Regulation Crypto Assets reads: "FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Patrick Faller, Special Counsel, Office of Chief Counsel, at (202) 551-3500, John Fieldsend, Special Counsel, Office of Rulemaking, at (202) 551-3430, or Irene Paik, Attorney-Advisor, Office of Crypto Assets, at (202) 551-2076, Division of Corporation Finance, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 100 F Street NE, Washington, DC 20549."
Three names, three offices, one division, and the office names are the only description the release offers of what any of the three do.
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Named contact
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Office
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Phone
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Patrick Faller, Special Counsel
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Office of Chief Counsel
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202-551-3500
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John Fieldsend, Special Counsel
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Office of Rulemaking
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202-551-3430
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Irene Paik, Attorney-Advisor
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Office of Crypto Assets
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202-551-2076
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Two other agency documents carry the name, and both reward reading precisely rather than loosely. The agenda for the open meeting scheduled for Friday, August 14, 2026, posted on Monday, August 10, listed six Division of Corporation Finance staff on the Regulation Crypto Assets item and gave a single contact for questions, Fieldsend at 202-551-3430, which the published release later widened to three.
The second document is an acknowledgment. In Commissioner Hester M. Peirce's statement on the proposal, dated Tuesday, August 18, 2026, she wrote that Commission staff "threw themselves into developing and refining a regulatory framework for crypto," then named eight people her thanks went to especially, Paik among them. Chairman Paul S. Atkins thanked twenty-nine Corporation Finance staff by name in his own statement the same day, and her name sits on that list too.
A thank-you list records that someone worked on a rulemaking. It does not say who drafted which provision, and no public document does, so nothing here will guess. A full-text search of the Federal Register returns exactly one document containing her name, and it is this one.
What an Attorney-Advisor Does and What the Office of Crypto Assets Is
Attorney-Advisor is a career civil service title rather than an appointment. Jim Moloney is the Director of the Division of Corporation Finance and Paik works well below that, so the agency names staff at her level only when a document needs a contact on it, which is exactly the circumstance that put her in front of the public.
The division describes its own work in three parts, none of which is a vote. It gets investors the information they need to make informed decisions, it provides interpretive assistance to companies on SEC rules and forms, and it recommends new rules to the Commission.
The Office of Crypto Assets sits inside that division, and the release itself says what the office handles. A footnote to its economic analysis refers to filings being routed to "the Division of Corporation Finance's Office of Crypto Assets disclosure review," which is the plain answer. The office reads crypto-related filings and works out what the disclosure has to say. The division's crypto assets page is the visible output, carrying staff statements on meme coins, mining, stablecoins, staking, exchange-traded products and tokenized securities issued between February 2025 and January 2026, every one of them cited in the proposing release.
So the honest description of the job is narrow and useful at once. Career staff read filings, write guidance, answer questions and build proposals, and five Commissioners decide.
Why That Phone Number Is Not the Comment Channel
This is the part search results handle worst. A named contact and a comment file are two different doors, and only one of them leads anywhere permanent.
Calling 202-551-2076 gets a question about the proposal in front of a staff member who works on the subject, and it is off the record by construction. Nothing said on that call enters the docket, nothing is published, and the Commission owes no written response to it anywhere. Filing on File No. S7-2026-27 does something else entirely. The submission posts publicly under the name attached to it, it joins the record the staff reads, and an agency that ignores significant comments hands a court the standard reason to vacate a final rule later.
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Calling a named contact
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Filing on File No. S7-2026-27
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Enters the public record
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No
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Yes
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Published under your name
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No
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Yes
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Must be reckoned with in an adopting release
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No
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Significant comments, yes
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Open to anyone with no eligibility test
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Yes
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Yes
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Has a stated deadline
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No
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Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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The release also warns filers against including personal identifiable information, because everything submitted stays public and indexed under that name permanently. The contact block is for understanding the proposal and the comment file is for changing it, so anyone who reaches the end of the release carrying an argument rather than a question has been pointed at the wrong number.
The Rule Those Three Names Sit On
Coverage keeps describing Regulation Crypto Assets as three pathways, and the release describes something structurally different. There are two exemptions from the registration requirements of section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933, and beside them a conditional safe harbor. An exemption relieves an issuer of a registration duty. A safe harbor puts the asset outside the definition of security to begin with, which is a different result reached by a different route.
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Subpart
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Instrument
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Limit
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Filing
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B, Rule 200
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Startup exemption
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Up to $5 million over a four-year period, one-time use
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Notice of reliance on new Form NOR
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C, Rules 300-307
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Fundraising exemption, modeled on Regulation A
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Tier 1 up to $20 million and Tier 2 up to $75 million in each 12-month period
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Offering statement on new Form 1-CRYPTO
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D, Rule 400
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Investment contract safe harbor
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No dollar limit, condition-based
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Transition report on new Form TR
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Rule 400 is the one people misread. A covered investment contract is deemed to have ceased to exist, so that the crypto asset stops being subject to it, once the issuer has completed or permanently ceased all the essential managerial efforts it represented it would perform and is making no new promises of that kind, certified on Form TR. It is not a status a project can claim by announcing decentralization on a blog, and it leaves open what a DeFi front end owes once an issuer has genuinely stopped. A fourth subpart would preempt state registration requirements through a definition of "qualified purchaser."
A proposed rule is not law, and October 20 is not an implementation date. Nothing here becomes available to any issuer on October 21. The date closes the comment record and does nothing else, after which the Commission can adopt the rule as proposed, adopt it changed, re-propose it, withdraw it, or leave it sitting, and only an adopting release sets effective and compliance dates. The Commission's rule page for File No. S7-2026-27 records releases 33-11434 and 34-106150, an issue date of Tuesday, August 18, 2026 and Federal Register publication on Friday, August 21. The document runs 146 pages, closes with the line "By the Commission. Dated: August 18, 2026," and opens a comment window of exactly sixty days from publication. It also does not reclassify Bitcoin, which was never the asset in question.
Five Other Comment Files Are Open and None of Them Is This One
Mixing these up is the easiest error available on this subject, so the dates and document numbers belong in one place. All six are verifiable at federalregister.gov by document number.
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File
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Agency
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FR document
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Comments close
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Further definition of "swap" and "security-based swap" and alternative compliance
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SEC and CFTC jointly
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2026-12743
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Monday, August 24, 2026
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Swap and security-based swap data reporting
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SEC and CFTC jointly
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2026-12742
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Monday, August 24, 2026
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Standard futures extended to 24/7 trading, and perpetual contracts on physically delivered or storable energy commodities
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CFTC
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2026-15216
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Wednesday, August 26, 2026
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Further implementation of portfolio margining and cross-margining
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SEC and CFTC jointly
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2026-13182
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Monday, August 31, 2026
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Commodity pool operators and commodity trading advisors, reduction of duplicative regulation
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CFTC
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2026-17079
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Monday, October 5, 2026
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Regulation Crypto Assets
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SEC
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2026-17183
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Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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One correction on that third row, because the over-correction is common. Only the perpetual-contracts half is scoped to physically delivered or storable energy commodities. The round-the-clock trading half applies to standard futures generally.
The CLARITY Act belongs in a third category and not on that table at all, because it is legislation moving through Congress rather than an agency acting under statutes that already exist. Atkins drew the separation himself on August 18, writing that legislation "remains indispensable" and that the SEC "has and will continue to support Congress in delivering the CLARITY Act to President Trump's desk." A comment letter has no bearing on a bill.
What Does Not Verify About Irene Paik
Start with a spelling correction, since it travels. The release says Attorney-Advisor with an o, and renderings of the title as Attorney-Adviser are off the primary text by one letter. On a piece built entirely from that text, the letter is worth getting right.
No SEC biography page exists for her, and the absence is structural rather than suspicious, because the agency publishes bios for Commissioners and for division and office directors and she is neither. Nothing establishes when she joined the Commission, what she did before it, or what she thinks about any provision in the proposal. A self-maintained professional profile circulates under the name, it is not an agency record, and this article draws nothing from it.
No public record exists of anything she has said about this rulemaking either, and the reason is a cancelled meeting. The open meeting set for Friday, August 14, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern was cancelled by a Sunshine Act notice dated Thursday, August 13 and published at 91 FR 53435, so the item was never presented to the Commission in public, and the proposal issued four days after the scheduled date. The staff list on that agenda therefore records who was assigned to the item, not who said what.
The release also attributes authorship to nobody. Reading a contact block as evidence that a particular staff member wrote a particular provision is an inference the document does not support, and the same goes for reading two acknowledgment lists as a ranking. Nothing says the number reaches her desk directly either, only that it is the route for questions, and that is all this article claims for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Irene Paik decide anything about the SEC crypto rule?
No. Rulemaking decisions belong to the five-member Commission, which votes on proposing and adopting releases, and the release attributes no decision authority to any staff member. Her name appears as a contact for questions about a proposal that has not been adopted.
What is the SEC's Office of Crypto Assets?
It is an office inside the Division of Corporation Finance that handles disclosure review for crypto-related filings, which is the work sitting behind the division's staff statements on meme coins, mining, staking, stablecoins and tokenized securities. It reviews what companies tell investors rather than deciding what is legal.
Can I call 202-551-2076 instead of filing a comment?
You can call with a question about the proposal, and it puts nothing on the record. Only a submission to File No. S7-2026-27 becomes part of the comment file, and only comments in that file carry weight in an adopting release.
Why does a proposed rule list phone numbers at all?
Every Federal Register document carries a FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT block naming officials who can answer questions about it, and on a 146-page release that block is the only place the public is pointed at a person rather than a docket. On this one it names three people across three offices of the same division.
Bottom Line
A name in a contact block is a routing instruction, and traders keep reading routing instructions as signals. Two records carry real information from here. The comment file for S7-2026-27 stays open until Tuesday, October 20, 2026 and letters post publicly as they land, which makes the docket the earliest readable indicator of which provisions are being fought over and by whom. And the adopting release, which arrives on no announced schedule and may never arrive at all, is where a $5 million startup exemption, a $75 million fundraising exemption and a conditional safe harbor either become usable or quietly do not. Until that release exists, the only thing in Regulation Crypto Assets anyone can act on is a comment form and a mailing address.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always conduct your own research before making trading decisions.
