As the SEC barrels forward with its pro-crypto agenda under the second Donald Trump administration, the agency’s sole remaining Democratic commissioner has begun openly questioning whether the sector is now being actively promoted by the Commission to a disproportionate extent.
During the regulator’s fourth crypto-focused roundtable since March, which today focused on moving traditional Wall Street securities onto blockchain networks, SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw interrogated whether the premise of hosting traditional finance firms at the agency’s headquarters, to discuss how they should adopt blockchain technology, may constitute overstepping.
In recent months, former Democratic SEC appointees have begun openly questioning the motives behind the Republican Party’s recent embrace of crypto, with some arguing that exempting the novel sector from securities regulations could in turn weaken consumer protections in traditional financial markets.
“No one seems to disagree that the SEC should remain a tech-neutral regulator,” Crenshaw said Monday. “So why is it our place to assess particular forms of blockchains as candidates for industry adoption? Why would we focus on blockchain in particular over other types of distributed ledger technologies?”
“Regulatory efforts to facilitate adoption of blockchain, let alone specific forms of it, seems a bit like the government picking winners and losers,” she continued.
The event was attended by representatives from Wall Street titans including BlackRock, Nasdaq, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton, all of which have expressed interest in offering securities via blockchain networks. It kicked off with remarks from SEC chair Paul Atkins, who praised crypto’s potential to revolutionize traditional financial markets.
“Blockchain technology holds the promise to allow for a broad swath of novel use cases for securities, fostering new kinds of market activities that many of the Commission’s legacy rules and regulations don’t even contemplate today,” he said.
The two principal selling points of tokenizing traditional securities markets have long been making such markets more efficient, and more accessible. Blockchain technology could, in theory, allow for the instantaneous, on-chain settlement of transactions like stock trades, which typically take a day to settle. Such speed could in turn allow for more accessible markets.
But Crenshaw pushed back on such assumptions Monday, arguing that current delays in settlement on Wall Street allow for key benefits. Those include granting flexibility to pause transactions in cases of fraud or national security risk, and drastically reducing the number of transactions requiring final settlement, by about 98%.
“This allows the current system to handle tremendous volume,” she said. “It’s a key reason why our markets withstood sustained, record breaking trading volume in recent weeks without major failures.”
Crenshaw questioned, further, whether blockchain networks would be capable of settling every stock trade live in real-time, without causing those networks to crash.
In her own remarks Monday, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, chief of the agency’s crypto task force, hailed blockchain technology as a tool with the potential to revolutionize securities markets just as the internet did. But she also acknowledged, deviating from prepared remarks, that her Democratic colleague may have a point about holding back from integrating instantaneous crypto transactions with Wall Street.
“As Commissioner Crenshaw discussed, there are reasons why that might not always be something we want,” Peirce said. “But I think it’s a potential we should be thinking about.”
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