A research report issued by JPMorgan Bank indicated that the release of Hinman’s documents last week in the case brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Ripple would strengthen Ethereum (ETH) and potentially drive the cryptocurrency market towards more decentralization. The published email correspondence associated with the former Director of Corporate Finance, William Hinman, who stated that Ethereum does not appear to be a security in defending the SEC’s case against Ripple.

The report pointed out that the senior leadership at the SEC did not classify Ethereum as a security in 2018, and officials of the SEC acknowledged that “the fact that tokens on an open network are sufficiently decentralized to separate from a securities offering has become a non-issue.”

The JPMorgan report suggests that these findings may explain why the SEC did not take action against Ethereum while targeting other cryptocurrency tokens this year.

The bank suggests that the easiest solution for Congress would be to classify Ethereum in the same category as Bitcoin (BTC) and regulate it as a commodity under the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

A new “other” category could be introduced specifically for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies that are decentralized enough to avoid being classified as securities, and the bank stated that “the more decentralized a cryptocurrency is, the greater its chance of avoiding classification as a security.”

The Hinman documents are likely to increase the competition among major cryptocurrencies to become more decentralized and resemble Ethereum more, according to the report.