The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair, Paul Atkins, gave an interview in which he revealed that digital asset companies can henceforth expect preliminary notices of any technical violations before the agency charges them or initiates an investigation.
In a further departure from the modus operandi of previous SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who championed a ‘regulation-by-enforcement’ approach to the digital asset sector, Atkins told the Financial Times that “you can’t just suddenly come and bash down their door and say uh-uh, we caught you, you’re doing something and it’s a technical violation.”
Instead, Atkins suggested that U.S. digital asset firms can now expect “preliminary notices” before the agency acts.
Under Gensler, the SEC was widely regarded as the bane of the digital asset space, due to the apparent fervor with which it exercised its brief to enforce securities laws over large portions of the sector. Gensler described the digital asset space on numerous occasions as “rife” with scams and frauds, a modern-day wild west.
Many of the biggest names in digital assets became the subjects of SEC investigations, enforcement actions, and civil suits, including Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Ripple, Terraform, Kraken, and Binance.
However, Gensler stepped down from his position in January, most likely seeing the writing on the wall as his retirement coincided with the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the most vocal and influential of the crypto sector’s advocates.
Trump initially appointed fellow Republican Mark Uyeda as interim Chair, a man who called the agency’s policies and approach during Gensler’s reign a “disaster for the whole industry.”
Eventually, Atkins was confirmed as the new permanent Chair of the SEC and officially sworn into office in April. The President stated at the time that the new chair “recognizes that digital assets and other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”
On Monday, Atkins reportedly told the FT that people “rightly criticised the SEC” in recent years as its decisions were “not grounded in precedent” or “predictability.” He added that the agency had a “shoot first and then ask questions later” approach.
Under Uyeda, and now Atkins, it has been made crystal clear that the SEC is taking a different approach to the digital asset space, one much more in line with President Trump’s agenda to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.”
No more trigger-happy SEC
Since the departure of Gensler, the SEC has dropped its long-running lawsuits against Ripple, Coinbase, and Binance, as well as removing its controversial staff accounting bulletin 121 (SAB 121), which required digital assets service providers to maintain users’ digital asset holdings on their own balance sheets.
The regulator has also moved away from applying an all-encompassing definition of securities to digital assets.
During his tenure as SEC Chair, Gensler indicated numerous times that most digital assets, with the possible exceptions of BTC and Ethereum (ETH), were securities—thus subject to securities regulation and the SEC’s oversight.
In contrast, in his FT interview, Atkins took almost the polar opposite stance, saying that most tokens do not fall under securities laws and that he intended to support trading tokenized versions of stocks and bonds with the same legal rights as their underlying assets.
This is in keeping with other actions taken during his and Uyeda’s tenure, with the regulator declaring in a February staff statement that meme coins are not securities, followed by another statement in April from the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance outlining how certain stablecoins will no longer be considered as securities.
Watch: Regulation is on full throttle
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Source: https://coingeek.com/sec-chair-paul-atkins-promises-notice-before-enforcement/
