SEC’s Hester Pierce claims US failed at regulating crypto

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce believes the U.S. has blundered regarding regulating the nascent crypto industry.

She shared these sentiments during the D.C. Blockchain Summit earlier this week, noting that the cumulative effects of these failures are causing her sleepless nights.

According to Peirce:

There’s a lot of fraud in this space, because it’s the hot area of the moment. The other piece that does concern me is the way that we’ve sort of dropped the regulatory ball.

She added that the U.S. has failed to create a conducive environment for crypto firms to innovate and experiment in a healthy way. Peirce further noted that this failure has long-term consequences.

The SEC Commissioner went on to note:

We can go after fraud and we can play a more positive role on the innovation side, but we have to get to it, we’ve got to get working. I haven’t seen us willing to do that work so far.

Peirce’s comments come after the crypto market crashed, losing more than half a trillion dollars in a few weeks. This crash was partially due to the collapse of TerraUSD (UST).

SEC continues to push for more control over the crypto market

SEC continues requesting more power over the crypto market. Previously, SEC Chair Gary Gensler could not pinpoint which cryptos fall under the SEC’s supervisory scope.

However, he recently gave testimony before the House of Appropriations Committee, saying the SEC has jurisdiction over most of the tokens in the market. Gensler also agreed that Bitcoin (BTC), the largest crypto by capitalization, may not fall under the SEC’s regulatory purview.

By admitting that BTC might be a commodity, Gensler echoed the sentiments of Rostin Behnam, the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who said BTC and Ether (ETH) are commodities and the crypto market has multiple commodity coins.

Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the SEC would eventually be in charge of the giant share of cryptos in the market.