Paul Atkins, Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), launched a campaign aimed at comprehensive reform of the Agency ' s provisions on encrypted currency regulation. He stressed the importance of ensuring that the results of its work were not easily withdrawn by future Governments.
Atkins said at the Fourth Annual Policy Summit of the Association of Block Chains, held in Washington, D.C.: “It is really important for me that we protect future work so that, whatever happens in the future, there will be no other extreme swing and much of our efforts will be lost.” However, he did not disclose concrete steps to be taken to lock in the coming changes.
Industry praise and details
Atkins' campaign, known as Project Crypto, has gained wide industry recognition since its announcement in July. At that time, he said that the “encrypted market-led” initiative would consider the benefits and risks of shifting markets from off-chain to the chain. SEC staff were instructed to develop proposals to address the long-standing confusion about the state of regulation of encrypted assets, to make it easier for traditional financial institutions to hold encrypted currency for their customers and to support the creation of one-stop financial services “super applications”.
In addition, Atkins highlighted the need to unlock the potential of chain-based software systems in the securities market. As mentioned in his November speech, encrypted assets can be classified into four categories: digital goods, digital collections, digital tools and tokenized securities. Of these, only tokenized securities should be considered to be SEC-regulated.
Focus on tokenized securities
Atkins notes that monetized securities will be the focus of the future encryption work of the SEC. In particular, rules relating to securities transactions are considered to be an area where changes are needed in order to adapt to currencyized stocks traded in chains. “Not all of these provisions have real meaning in the world in a monetized chain. The President said.
Opposing views and calls for free markets
Despite this plan, there are opposition voices. In a letter to SEC this month, Citadel Securities indicated that the relaxation of such rules could divide the United States stock market by favouring decentralised exchanges over non-traditional ones. Atkins, however, rejected any idea that might separate the traditional market from the smaller but more volatile encrypted market.
He stressed: “In terms of private block chains, fence gardens, I believe that the overall idea behind distributed book technology is interoperability and free movement. This is the core basic principle that we should uphold.”
“So let people innovate and let the market decide what it wants to do.”