WASHINGTON, D.C. — Staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are embracing the opportunity to ultimately haveh out policies to work with the crypto industry to oversee digital asset transactions.
Securities regulators are ready to “seriously ask for a viable framework,” Perth said during the agency’s first crypto-centric roundtable on Friday. “I think we’re ready for the spring ahead,” she said. She mentioned the title of the day’s event, “Spring Sprint towards the Clarity of Spring Caria.”
According to Peirce, “Can we translate security characteristics into a simple taxonomy that covers the different types of crypto assets that exist today and may exist in the future?”
Mark Weda, acting chairman of the agency, told reporters, despite recent SEC policy statements, certain areas of the crypto sector are not subject to the securities law (Memocoin and Mining, so far, “arguably possible” defined by others as securities.
“We’re moving multiple tracks here,” he said in response to a question from Coindesk. Although each statement issued so far has not received legal support “ultimately a staff statement,” he said the Round Table represents the entire committee (currently three members).
In his opening remarks at the event, Weda, who was appointed by President Donald Trump to await the confirmation of the Senate of Paul Atkins, argued that the agency should have wanted to make such an interpretation public in recent years.
“When judicial opinions created uncertainty from past participants, the committee and its staff intervened to provide guidance,” Ueda said. “This approach, which uses general rulemaking to explain the committee’s process or release rather than enforcement actions, should have been considered to classify crypto assets under federal security laws.”
Panel Discussion
The panel discussion focused on the specific issues that security attorneys in the crypto sector saw when advising companies.
“What is the biggest question you face when trying to wrestling with this question?” asked Sarah Brennan, a former SEC committee member who currently runs consulting firm Paredes Strategy, Delphi Venture’s advisor and one of 11 panelists.
“The ghost of the application of securities laws will move projects in the early stages of the market, take a very similar arc (first official service) and allow them to stay private longer,” she replied.
“These assets in the traditional model are designed to have a wide and wide early distribution, with most of the markets hedging on the application of securities laws, making them very similar to the traditional markets where people appear on exchange lists without their wide adoption or price support or without actually launching the technology entirely.”
The panel featured industry critics along with lawyers who worked on developing the sector.
“Whether it’s a farm in Hayel, an ostrich farm or an orange field, the overall point of securities regulations was to wrap it all around in very large, broad principled regulations,” said John Reed Stark, a former Sec lawyer. His concern is that even in 2025 there is no utility in many of the market.
“If everything’s gone tomorrow and you didn’t guess that, I wouldn’t mind,” he said.
Questions from lawmakers
Prior to the Round Table, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Massachusetts Democrat Jake Oatincross wrote an open letter to Weeda asking about the SEC staff statement on Mimecoin and how it was developed.
The letter asked if someone from the SEC had contacted the White House about the statement, whether the White House crypto working group had instructed the SEC to do something, and whether the staff statement was not incorporated into formal rulemaking.
Warren and Autincross also asked the SEC to explain how to clearly define memokine as different from “common cryptocurrency,” how to distinguish between actual memokine and memokine that do not meet staff statements, and how to distinguish memokine membranes analyzed when drafting staff statements.
Next up is NFTs?
Peirce spoke to reporters about the bystanders of the event, saying the next possibility of another agency’s crypto policy statement (following recent statements from Mimecoin and Mining) could be an inappropriate token. She said NFTs could likely benefit from clarifying their agency’s thinking.
“I think NFT can do it too,” she told reporters about the agency’s crypto roundtable bystanders on Friday. “We could have done that a long time ago.”
When asked by Coindesk whether an informal, non-binding staff statement was a way to approach policy signals from agencies, he said this was a recent response in which agencies were silent to talk about it.
“It’s true, there’s a role to create notifications and comments rules, but I don’t think that’s the case when you’re saying, ‘This is how we see the law,'” she said. “You don’t need it.”
She also worked on reports that federal budget cuts would lead to cuts in SEC staff of hundreds of people.
“When you lose someone who has a lot of experience, that’s always sad to me, but people go back and forth from the SEC,” she said. “They’re going to retire, so we need to have a deep bench.”
Update (March 21, 2025, 20:12 UTC): Add a comment from Hester Peirce.
