In 2017 the story was simple. You draw a circle on a whiteboard write Protocol in the middle add some arrows to words like Decentralized and Disintermediated and then you say The token is the oil that makes this machine run. If the machine succeeds the token moons. That is the Howey test dressed up in a hoodie. You are selling an expectation of profit from the efforts of a team. That is a security.

The SECs new line is basically this. A thing can be a security in the way it is sold without the thing itself being ontologically a security forever. Sell some orange groves with a management contract and that is an investment contract. The oranges sitting on a grocery shelf later are not securities. Same logic for tokens.

That is not some deep philosophical pivot. It is a bureaucratic way to say This market exists and we are tired of arguing with it about vocabulary. We will regulate the fund raising and the schemes but we will not pretend that every transferable string of bytes is a share of stock until the end of time