As the spring wind blows, how will the subsequent crypto compliance move forward?
Author: Pzai, Foresight News
According to The Wall Street Journal, the SEC abandoned its investigation into Uniswap Labs on February 26. Previously, the SEC had also abandoned or delayed investigations into OpenSea and Coinbase.
Since Gary Gensler took over the SEC, the crypto industry has had many criticisms of US regulation. As the crypto market has gradually flourished, the amount of fines imposed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has increased sharply in recent years, reaching a high of $4.7 billion in 2024, exceeding the total of the previous 6 years (the Terraform Labs' UST incident accounts for most of it). In the past decade, the SEC has issued fines totaling nearly $3 billion in the digital asset-related field.
But with the advent of the Trump administration, the active embrace of cryptocurrencies has prompted the SEC to begin loosening the regulatory stranglehold on crypto, even to a certain extent reaching a "vacuum". On February 4, the SEC released the work plan of the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, marking an important transformation in the US's crypto regulation. This working group aims to bring more clarity to the regulatory framework for crypto assets while maintaining support for innovation. What does this mean for the market? As the spring wind blows, how will the subsequent crypto compliance move forward?
Regulatory Shift
Previously, the SEC's regulatory storm had spread to multiple exchanges (such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, etc.) and top crypto protocols (such as Ripple, TON, ConsenSys, etc.), among which Ripple Labs was closely watched by the crypto market for the issue of whether XRP should be classified as a security under US law, and was fined $125 million, while Telegram was found to have illegally sold unregistered tokens in its TON token offering and was fined $1.2 billion. This also highlighted that in the previous regulatory moves, the SEC focused on regulating specific company cases rather than broad regulations in the crypto field, creating uncertainty for the crypto industry.
With the crypto industry's victory, 18 US states have accused the SEC and its commissioners of overstepping their constitutional authority and "unfairly treating" the crypto industry as of November 2024. In a September 2024 Foresight News interview with SEC "Crypto Mom" Hester M. Peirce, she also expressed disappointment with the regulatory policies at the time: "I'm frustrated by our lack of progress, which also motivates me to continue advocating for better engagement with the crypto world. I hope to see the SEC's future direction is not just as a 'Securities and Enforcement Commission', but to make crypto projects feel they can truly come and communicate with us, and register when necessary."
After the turning point, Teresa Goody Guillén, a former SEC litigation counsel and partner at BakerHostetler, also expects the SEC to bring fewer cases against crypto companies in the new year, and in the future it can only bring lawsuits in cases involving securities.
Further reading: Dialogue with SEC "Crypto Mom": Behind the $3 billion in fines over 10 years, is the lack of regulatory progress in the US
SEC's New Birth
In its recent actions, the SEC has indeed been steadily advancing the "compliance" of crypto regulation, including withdrawing appeals against rules opposing crypto trading firms; promoting crypto classification laws and regulatory frameworks; suspending and withdrawing lawsuits against crypto mining companies Geosyn Mining, trading platforms Robinhood Crypto, NFT platforms OpenSea, DEX Uniswap and other project entities.
In this broader environment, the approval of ETFs is also accelerating, and even progress is being made in ETF staking. On February 20, according to a report by Fox reporter Eleanor Terrett, sources recently in contact with the SEC said the agency is "very, very interested" in staking, and the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit met with representatives of Jito Labs and Multicoin Capital on February 5, with the main topics including the possibility of including staking features in exchange-traded products (ETPs) and potential models for staking crypto assets in crypto ETPs.
Behind these frequent actions, the SEC's newly established Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit this February has played an important role. This working group aims to systematically solve the legal uncertainties facing the industry and enhance the transparency and predictability of regulation. As the leader of this working group, Peirce stated in the work plan of the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit that the group's top priority is to resolve the status of crypto assets under securities law, clarify the securities attribution of crypto assets, and on this basis develop corresponding regulatory frameworks, while providing a temporary exemption path for compliant projects.
In this part, Pierce summarized several core tasks:
- Clarify the boundaries: The working group will strictly operate within the SEC's statutory authority, while actively cooperating with other regulatory agencies to build a comprehensive and coordinated regulatory system. A key initiative is to promote the implementation of cross-border sandboxes. Within this sandbox, projects can conduct limited experiments based on the regulatory frameworks of different countries.
- Steady progress: Given the high complexity of the crypto currency regulation field, reforms cannot be achieved overnight, but require a large investment of time and effort, and a gradual and orderly advancement. The working group will adhere to the principles of order and legality, and steadily carry out its work.
- Efficient handling: In order to better adapt to the industry's development needs, the working group will strive to accelerate the processing of exemption applications, no-action letters, and registration statements, improve work efficiency, and reduce unnecessary time costs.
It is heartening to see that from the SEC's perspective, Pierce and her team have also become the stabilizer for the advancement of crypto regulation. She also stated in a previous interview: "I hope we can tell people that the US SEC has an open attitude towards innovators from anywhere. We want people to come here and build things, just as people come from all over the world to invest in our capital markets, because our markets are very good markets. I hope the quality of our markets becomes the reason people decide to come here."
