Industry players worry US innovation may be impeded by the regulator’s actions
Jacquelyn Melinek
7 hours
The waters have been very hot in the crypto industry this week. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed two separate lawsuits against two of the largest crypto exchanges in the world: Binance and Coinbase.
“This is about both investors and issuers in the crypto space, to bring them into compliance,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a live interview with CNBC on Tuesday morning. “We brought a number of actions. We stand ready to continue to work with the industry.”
The industry is asking why these suits took so long to come to fruition, why some crypto assets are being labeled as securities and not others, and whether the SEC’s actions will impact domestic and global fintech innovation – all of which Gensler tried to address.
Gensler didn’t hold back his feelings on the industry’s significance: “We don’t need more digital currency. We already have digital currency. It’s called the U.S. dollar, it’s called the Euro, it’s called the Yen. They’re all digital right now […] so what’s the real underlying value of these tokens?”
The SEC chair also said the agency has had conversations with “dozens of crypto incumbents” and currently believes that the industry’s business model is “built on non-compliance with the U.S. securities laws” and many are “commingling various functions that in traditional finance we don’t allow.”
What we’re doing at the SEC is pro-innovation, because without trust, the capital markets …
