The SEC’s crypto task force held its first public meeting with experts last Friday, focusing on how securities laws might apply to digital assets as President Trump’s administration looks to provide more clarity around the nation’s cryptocurrency regulations and enforcement approach.
It was the first of a series of events dubbed “Spring Sprint Toward Crypto Clarity,” and it took place just a day after Trump spoke at the Blockworks Digital Asset Summit, where he called for US dollar dominance and vowed to make America a crypto superpower.
This comes right after the SEC released a statement clarifying that crypto mining activities do not constitute securities offerings, a statement intended to boost confidence for PoW (Proof-of-Work) cryptocurrency investors. And it arrives just after the agency withdrew its case against Coinbase and its appeal in a case against Ripple Labs.
Participating at the roundtable were current and former regulatory professionals and industry participants, including John Reed Stark, former chief of the SEC’s Office of Internet Enforcement; Miles Jennings, the general counsel for Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, a16z; and former SEC Commissioner Troy Paredes who moderated the panel event.
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce is leading the SEC’s task force. “Spring signifies new beginnings and we have a new beginning here, a restart of the commission’s approach to crypto regulation,” she said at the start of the event.
Statements from regulators, industry
Acting Chair Mark Uyeda, in his prepared remarks, said the SEC’s approach of using notice-and-comment rulemaking or explaining its thought process through releases – rather than through enforcement actions – should have been the strategy used in classifying crypto assets under the federal securities laws.
“Today’s roundtable is an important first step in addressing that concern,” he said.
Democrat Caroline Crenshaw said in her statement that she agrees that policy must keep pace with new products and technologies. But she asked the task force participants to take into account the heightened risks associated with crypto assets, including their speculative nature, a disproportionately high volume of scams and frauds, lack of legal redress available against bad actors that are unidentifiable or located abroad, and use of crypto assets to finance crime and terrorism.
“Modifying the law to facilitate the success of a chosen product category is fraught with risk,” said Crenshaw. “Risk not only of weakening regulatory protections for that category, but of creating the negative domino effect on other areas of the market protected by the same laws.”
Jennings urged the SEC to take a “technology-neutral” approach, “looking at what differentiates a system like ethereum from ownership of equity in Apple.”
Thoughts from experts
Experts in the digital asset space commented on the event before it began, all of them agreeing that clearer regulations will likely accelerate rather than hinder adoption of the assets.
“The most dangerous environment for financial innovation isn’t tight regulation but regulatory uncertainty. When nobody knows which rules apply, conservative institutional money stays on the sidelines. The SEC’s withdrawal might lay the groundwork for more institutional participation by beginning to define the boundaries of the playing field,” said Altan Tutar, Co-Founder and CEO of MoreMarkets, an app that serves as a global liquidity marketplace.
And Vugar Usi Zade, COO of Bitget, a cryptocurrency exchange, said that he hoped the roundtable would produce something like a blueprint for how exchanges, investors, and developers better understand the rules of the game. And that it balances protecting investors without smothering innovation. Finally, he hopes to see a framework that better promotes the US in terms of its global competitiveness in this space.
“Should rules remain vague, the US runs the danger of lagging behind. Look at the MiCA structure of the EU or the licensing rules of Singapore; they are setting the bar high by providing consistency,” he said.
