SEC’s New Podcast Outlines Crypto As Top Priority In Pro-Innovation Agenda

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman and two Commissioners have highlighted the crypto industry as one of the top priorities in the regulatory agency’s pivot toward clearer and pro-innovation oversight.

In the first episode of the SEC’s official “Material Matters” podcast, Atkins outlined the crypto industry as “one area now that is really top on our list to try to get right with respect to regulation.”

The commissioner considers that under the SEC’s new approach, the regulator can better address the problems the crypto industry may face and open opportunities for innovation in this sector.

“We need to have financial regulations that are open to innovators because innovation is what makes the financial markets resilient. It’s what ensures that they serve people’s actual needs,” she stated.

To make the US a country where people want to innovate, she suggested that regulators must demonstrate they are willing to work with innovators to resolve ambiguities about how the law applies to their circumstances. This approach, Peirce affirmed, will benefit US investors and markets.

And there have been a lot of ambiguities in connection with crypto, which is a new technology that does things in new ways. Having a good regulatory structure in place is going to be helpful to us (…) to identify where the bad activity is and to go after that bad activity, and not to spend our enforcement resources where our regulatory resources could have done the job.

When asked what a top priority should be to address potential risks related to crypto assets, Peirce noted that there hasn’t been a regulatory framework around spot trading. She also noted that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will address that in the future.

The Commissioner also noted that the recent cooperation between the two sister agencies has been helpful, as they want to ensure they are not spending unnecessary resources to address the same problem.

The agencies outlined their plan to clarify jurisdictional boundaries, remove redundant compliance requirements, and reduce regulatory fragmentation through their collaboration.

“I think having the close cooperation with the CFTC ensures that we’re monitoring markets which are very interrelated with one another, and then thinking about where it makes sense for products to be regulated, who the primary regulators should be,” the Commissioner argued.

The SEC chairman affirmed that “this is a very important inflection point, I think, in the American markets,” concluding that there are “a lot of opportunities ahead of us. So, it really is a historic time.”