During the first month of the Trump administration, the crypto industry has celebrated a string of victories, from Trump announcing a planned “strategic reserve” of digital assets held by the U.S. government to the pardoning of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road.
The most consequential change for the blockchain sector, though, has been the Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision to halt its relentless enforcement campaign, and to drop or pause key lawsuits and investigations against top companies, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Yuga Labs.
In an interview with Fortune, Republican SEC commissioner and so-called ‘Crypto Mom’ Hester Peirce touted the agency’s new approach to overseeing the blockchain industry, including the establishment of a task force she is leading to create clearer rules of the road for the upstart sector. “Our law is not supposed to be a game of gotcha,” she said. “Let’s just take a step back, revisit things, and get people’s input, now that people know they can come in and talk to us.”
‘Bad scars’
President Biden was not popular with many in the crypto sector, but more unpopular yet was his pick to lead the SEC, former Goldman Sachs banker Gary Gensler. As agency head, Gensler continued a pivotal lawsuit against the crypto firm Ripple and also unleashed a sprawling enforcement campaign against an array of top exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance, that drew backlash from industry heads, lawmakers, and his own commissioners, including Peirce, who accused him of engaging in “regulation by enforcement.”
In the post-Gensler era, the SEC has pivoted dramatically to embrace a pro-crypto outlook, with Peirce at the forefront. That has included heading up a new task force that will address thorny issues such as choosing the proper taxonomy for a crypto asset security. The task force has already held a series of meetings with top crypto figures, including MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, Fidelity, and Robinhood.
“Some people have really bad scars from past interactions with the SEC,” Peirce told Fortune.
While the crypto industry has lauded the SEC’s shift, the agency’s decision to drop most of its ongoing litigation has raised eyebrows, especially with several cases set to move forward to the appellate level after disagreements among district judges. Peirce, though, viewed the litigation as premature.
“It doesn’t make sense to bring in a lot of courts to look at this issue—a process that takes a long time—when we haven’t sorted it out on our side yet,” she argued.
Along with the establishment of the task force, the SEC also reshuffled its crypto enforcement unit, rebranding the group to the “Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit” with an updated remit of focusing on fraud, rather than more staid securities violations. “We are pivoting in terms of how we think about whether to use our enforcement tools and when to use it,” Peirce said, while adding that people shouldn’t assume they have a “free pass” because they put a “crypto label” on fraud. She also said that the SEC would continue to go after “run of the mill” securities violations.
Still, where Gensler prioritized consumer protection, Peirce has argued against having what she calls “Mama government” protecting investors from making bad choices. “People lose money on lots of different things,” she told Fortune. “If the standard of the SEC’s jurisdiction turns on whether you can lose money on buying something, our jurisdiction is massive. But that isn’t the jurisdiction that Congress gave us.”
With the SEC still waiting for the confirmation of new chair Chair Paul Atkins, as well as long-promised market structure regulation from Congress, Peirce made clear that the new agency would still move forward with establishing its own regulatory framework. While she declined to provide a timeline, she said that “pieces” of the plan will be done this year, such as designing the taxonomy for crypto securities.
“In my dream world, we would have had it five years ago,” she told Fortune.
