Nova Labs CLO Takes Helium's Dismissed SEC Claims to House CLARITY Act Hearing

When Sarah Aberg walked into Federal Hall National Memorial on July 17, she brought something most witnesses at congressional crypto hearings cannot: a recently concluded enforcement story. As chief legal officer of Nova Labs, the company behind Helium Network HNT$0.205+0.2%, Aberg had spent years managing a Securities and Exchange Commission action that challenged whether the network's tokens were unregistered securities. In April 2025, those claims were dismissed with prejudice. She made that outcome the center of her case before the House Financial Services Digital Assets Subcommittee's field hearing in New York.

Titled "Building the Future of Finance: How the CLARITY Act Unlocks Innovation," the session was designed to build Senate pressure ahead of the August 7 recess deadline, with the floor vote still in jeopardy as Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked over ethics provisions. The subcommittee chose Federal Hall (where Washington took the first presidential oath and Hamilton set up the first Treasury Department) as the venue for a hearing explicitly framed around rewriting the rules of American financial infrastructure.

What the SEC Case Against Nova Labs Actually Settled

The SEC complaint, filed in January 2025 in the Southern District of New York, contained two distinct sets of allegations. The first claimed that HNT, along with Helium's MOBILE and IOT tokens, constituted unregistered securities offerings. Those claims were dropped with prejudice, barring the SEC from refiling the same arguments. The second set alleged that Nova Labs misled Series D equity investors by overstating relationships with Lime, Nestlé, and Salesforce, implying those companies were active network customers when contact had been limited to small-scale testing years before Helium launched. Nova Labs paid $200,000 to settle the investor-communications claims without admitting wrongdoing, as CoinDesk reported when the final judgment was entered.

The distinction matters for what Aberg argued in front of lawmakers. The token claims were not settled; they were abandoned by the regulator. Nova Labs never conducted public token sales. HNT is distributed to hotspot operators as compensation for wireless coverage they provide to the network, a participation incentive rather than a fundraising instrument. That model is the basis for the regulatory argument she brought to the House subcommittee.

Aberg's Case for CFTC Jurisdiction Over Functional Network Tokens

Helium now operates more than 140,000 hotspots serving millions of users, per Aberg's testimony, making it the largest decentralized physical infrastructure network built on Solana. The network has continued to expand: earlier this week, Nova Labs opened new expansion zones across major New York City venues, a timing that put Helium's footprint directly in view of a subcommittee meeting in the same city.

Aberg's testimony drew a line between tokens sold to raise capital and tokens that function as the operating incentive layer of a working network.

"We're trying to build infrastructure," Aberg told the subcommittee. "We're not trying to raise capital through selling tokens."

She told the hearing that clarity is not a call for deregulation but a call for the right regulator, framing the CLARITY Act as a jurisdictional correction: functional network tokens should fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates commodity spot markets, rather than the SEC, which regulates investment contracts. The CLARITY Act would codify this by creating a statutory decentralization test to assign tokens to the appropriate regulator rather than leaving that determination to agency discretion.

The concrete cost of the current ambiguity, in Aberg's telling, is years of legal defense against claims a regulator ultimately chose to abandon. "We need the certainty of legislation codified into law that cannot be changed at the whim of whoever happens to be sitting at the SEC or the White House," she said. After the hearing, Aberg posted that "clear rules are what let people-built infrastructure like Helium keep growing safely in the United States." The official Helium account amplified the statement, calling the appearance "boots on the ground today in support of the CLARITY Act."

WisdomTree, Bullish, and Coin Center at the Federal Hall Hearing

Aberg was joined by three other witnesses with different points of emphasis. Randi Abernethy, head of clearing and group risk at Bullish, cited regulatory gaps that pushed her exchange to establish operations in Gibraltar, Germany, and Hong Kong. Ryan Louvar, chief legal officer at WisdomTree, focused on how the bill's Section 505 would modernize the operational mechanics of tokenized securities without changing their regulatory substance. Coin Center's Jason Somensatto took a broader position: Congress must write rules that protect participants while preserving the freedom to build open-source infrastructure.

The subcommittee was chaired by Bryan Steil. Rep. Tim Moore pressed witnesses on whether the bill would reverse the offshore migration of crypto firms, citing data that roughly a third of Americans own or use digital assets. "This isn't some fleeting thing that's going to go away," Moore told the subcommittee.

Where the CLARITY Act Stands Before August Recess

The CLARITY Act (H.R. 3633) passed the House in July 2025 by a 294-134 bipartisan margin and cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 in May 2026. It has sat on the Senate calendar since June 1. It needs 60 votes to clear cloture, a threshold that requires bipartisan support in a chamber where ethics provisions remain unresolved. Galaxy Research has put the odds of 2026 enactment at 60-75%.

The New York hearing was not itself a legislative step. Its function was to build a public record and apply pressure on uncommitted Senate members before Congress breaks in August. Federal Hall provided the backdrop; Helium's legal history with the SEC provided the argument. For Aberg, the testimony was less about the bill's legislative prospects and more about what building distributed infrastructure on Solana has actually cost in legal resources, and what it would look like if the framework were built around the right regulator from the start.

The Helium community has been active on governance of its own network as the policy fight progresses: in mid-July, HIP-149 passed and opened the first Advisory Council election for veHNT holders, adding a community oversight layer to the network's operations. The external regulatory question Aberg took to Capitol Hill and the internal governance work happening in parallel are, in practice, connected: a clearer legal framework is what determines how much operational energy Nova Labs can devote to the network itself rather than to defending it.