“It doesn’t need to be done as a rulemaking,” said SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who has led much of the agency’s crypto work since early last year. In response to a question from CoinDesk, she said the SEC has exemption powers that it routinely uses. “We can do it as a rule, but we don’t have to do it as a rule.”
In March, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins described the incoming policy as “an innovation exemption to facilitate limited trading in certain tokenized securities with a view to developing a long-term regulatory framework.” He said it would be “limited in time and scope, but long enough for us to create more durable rules that take advantage of the full potential of these new technologies.”
More recently in May, he added: “I also think we should consider what a future-proof framework might look like, which would take the form of notice and comment rules and would address the ‘exchange’ definition as applied to onchain trading systems.”
CoinDesk polled the views of several attorneys who are former SEC officials, asking questions about the choice to delay formal rulemaking and whether the interim work on it will stop. Most agreed that the approach might not carry the highest force of SEC authority, but it would still be hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube if the next administration sees things differently.
