SEC Chairman Paul Atkins: Crypto may become the "most powerful financial surveillance architecture," but a regulatory framework can still be advanced without sacrificing privacy.

At the sixth roundtable meeting of the SEC Crypto Task Force, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins stated that if regulatory direction is unbalanced, the crypto ecosystem could become "the most powerful financial surveillance architecture in history." He warned that if governments tend to treat "every wallet as a broker, every piece of software as an exchange, every transaction as a reporting tool, and every protocol as a monitoring node," the industry will become a "panopticon of finance." SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce also stated at the meeting that privacy protection should be the norm, not seen as a signal of criminal intent, and urged governments to avoid forcibly intermediating entities to create regulatory tools or facilitate surveillance. (The Block)