In a fireside chat on July 7, courtesy of Unitize, Commissioner Hester Peirce of the Securities and Exchange Commission continued to advocate for regulatory clarity for cryptomonies as a means of opening up capital markets to innovation.

Innovation and regulation

„I believe in the power of our capital markets to transform people’s lives,“ Peirce said. „I wanted to make sure our regulatory structure was flexible enough to accommodate innovation. He said the size of the U.S. economy makes its regulations critical to global fundraising:

„The race to the bottom is something that should concern us. But that’s one more reason for a jurisdiction like the United States to try to develop a viable framework that allows people to come in and take advantage of our market.

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Peirce continued to advocate for the role of the U.S. government in establishing traffic rules, but also minimized innovation from the public sector itself:

„Remember that innovation usually comes from the government sector. We need to establish a framework that allows people who spend a lot of time thinking about new ideas to continue to spend time thinking about those ideas and not a lot of time worrying about compliance.

Limits to SEC jurisdiction at the international level

Peirce also spoke on the issue of SEC jurisdiction at the international level. With trade in digital assets largely independent of borders, the SEC’s role has been controversial, as in the case of Telegram.

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„It’s certainly a difficult area and it’s a difficult area even without blockchain,“ Peirce said. „Even apart from finding out where jurisdictionally we can go … I ask the question ‚is it a good use of our resources?

Exactly how the SEC determines which projects to pursue remains a puzzling question, although Peirce asked industry players to point out bad players to the commission rather than wait for his investigators to find them on their own.

Safe harbor proposal

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Peirce’s proposed safe harbor for token projects seeking to build networks has attracted a lot of attention in the cryptology field. In response to a question about the answer, he rejected the idea that the measure would „provoke another boom in 2017-type ICOs. She compared the situation at the time to the current COVID-19 scams, saying

„When you have something like crypto-money, which gets a lot of media attention, you get a group of people saying, ‚oh, this is perfect, I’m going to take advantage of this while I can.