On June 9th, Paul Atkins, the chairperson of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), stated at the agency’s fifth cryptocurrency roundtable that the ability to hold cryptocurrencies without intermediaries is at the core of U.S. law.
At the “Decentralized Finance and the American Spirit” conference, Atkins linked decentralized finance (DeFi) to the private property rights and open market traditions in the United States. He described blockchain as a peer-to-peer database that can record the ownership of digital assets without central control, and pointed out that network participants compete in the fee market to verify transactions and keep the ledger synchronized.
The new chairperson of the SEC compared this model with the practices of the previous administration, claiming that the previous administration attempted to prevent people from participating through enforcement actions and public statements, and characterized mining, verification and staking services as securities activities. He praised the company’s finance department for later clarifying that the regular verification work conducted through pledge did not fall within the scope of federal securities laws, but added that the guidance was insufficient because it lacked the effectiveness of rule-making.
Atkins urged the committee to formulate regulations based on the authorization of Congress rather than relying on the opinions of informal staff. He believes that forcing intermediaries will increase costs and restrict on-chain functions such as staking. Atkins criticized the early regulatory actions that marked wallet developers as unregistered brokers, saying that the release of the software alone should not give rise to securities obligations. He compared such law enforcement actions to suing car companies for crimes committed by drivers using self-driving cars. Atkins emphasized that many blockchain applications operate without an administrator, which takes them beyond the framework written for a market centered on issuers.
He asked the staff to study how registrants interact with the automated execution code while meeting the disclosure and custody requirements. The SEC chair also supported the amendment that allows intermediaries to migrate settlement and clearing to the blockchain to reduce friction and enhance liquidity. To speed up the experiment, Atkins instructed the staff to design an “innovation exemption” that could offer conditional exemptions to companies launching on-chain products.
Atkins insists that lasting policies must be established through publicy-comment rule-making rather than through interim statements or litigation. He also added that during the recent market pressure period, resilient on-chain protocols continued to handle transactions, while several centralized platforms encountered problems. Atkins concluded that the commission will seek formal rules and possible exemptions to incorporate self-custody and decentralized finance into the securities framework without compromising the protection of long-term investors.
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