- Industry allies have been tapped for interim posts atop crypto regulators SEC and CFTC.
- SEC acting chair Mark Uyeda announced the formation of a crypto task force.
- The task force will be charged with creating a "clear regulatory framework."
US Securities and Exchange Commission member Hester Peirce, an industry ally affectionately known as “crypto mom,” will lead a new “crypto task force” charged with creating bespoke regulations for digital assets.
The news comes days after Donald Trump, who was sworn in as the 47th US president on Monday, tapped Mark Uyeda, an SEC commissioner, and Caroline Pham, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission member, to temporarily lead their respective agencies.
Both commissioners are considered industry allies and will lead their agencies until the Senate approves permanent chairs nominated by Trump.
The president has nominated attorney Paul Atkins to lead the SEC, but he has yet to nominate someone to lead the CFTC.
Peirce and Uyeda have been dissenting voices on the Democrat-controlled SEC over the past couple of years.
Over half of the SEC’s crypto-related enforcement actions since 2015 have come under Gensler’s leadership, according to a September analysis by crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.
Gensler has said most crypto tokens are securities, like stocks and bonds, and his SEC repeatedly charged companies large and small with failure to register and provide the kind of disclosures that investors have long relied on to make informed decisions. The SEC’s targets have included obscure NFT creators and giants like Coinbase.
Industry executives have said that cryptocurrencies have little in common with traditional securities like stocks and bonds and shouldn’t be subject to century-old laws written in a different era.
Moreover, the SEC has provided little guidance for firms that have attempted to register, they say.
“Leaving crypto to be addressed in an endless series of misguided and overreaching cases has been and continues to be a consequential mistake,” the pair wrote in September after the SEC sued Flyfish Club for selling non-fungible tokens.
Peirce’s repeated criticism of SEC lawsuits has earned her the nickname “crypto mom,” though she disavowed it in a past interview with DL News.
“I think it’s funny, but at the same time, I do take a little bit of an issue with the term ‘mom’,” the commissioner said in July.
“I’m not your mom.”
Nevertheless, industry allies in Washington cheered the task force news.
“I’m already seeing our industry’s bright future come into focus,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, wrote on X.
The SEC’s approach to crypto under Gensler created “an environment hostile to innovation and conducive to fraud,” the agency said in a news release announcing the task force.
“To date, the SEC has relied primarily on enforcement actions to regulate crypto retroactively and reactively, often adopting novel and untested legal interpretations along the way,” it said.
“The task force’s focus will be to help the commission draw clear regulatory lines, provide realistic paths to registration, craft sensible disclosure frameworks, and deploy enforcement resources judiciously.”
Aleks Gilbert is a DeFi correspondent based in New York. He can be reached at aleks@dlnews.com.
