Hester Pierce, a member of the US SEC, confirmed that she would leave the agency in November this year to finish working in the public sector for nearly 30 years in Washington. Pierce has been known by the market as “encrypted mother” because of his long-standing relative openness to the encryption industry. At the time of her departure, the SEC was still advancing discussions on the regulatory framework for digital assets.

Time of departure specified

Pierce recently indicated in a podcast that she would leave the SEC in November and then go to the University of Regent University as an associate professor. She said that she wanted to turn to teaching and to be involved in developing the next generation of legal talent.

Pierce was first sworn in in January 2018, renominated in 2020 and confirmed by the United States Senate in August of that year. Her term of office expired on 5 June 2025, but under United States law members may remain in office for up to 18 months until their successors have been confirmed.

This means she could have stayed near the beginning of December 2026, but she has confirmed that she will leave several weeks in advance.

SEC encryption supervision facing personnel vacancies

Pierce was appointed head of the SEC encryption working group at the beginning of 2025. Upon her departure, the active member of the SEC would be left with the Chairperson, Paul Atkins, and the Commissioner, Marc Ouyeda, and there would be no Democratic Party-appointed members in the body for the time being.

This change has been of particular interest at this point in time. The United States encryption industry is waiting for a clearer arrangement from the SEC on the regulatory framework for digital assets, and Pierce has been seen as one of the key players on this subject.

The focus she had mentioned before her departure also included the promotion of more businesses to become market-oriented and the elimination of market restructuring such as trade-through rule.

“Innovative exemptions” have not yet been published

Pearce also took the initiative to cool down the programme on digital assets of market concern “innovation”. She indicated that the arrangement had not yet been published and that there had been many misinterpretations from the outside.

She noted, in particular, that some of them had interpreted them to support a synthetic security transaction, but that that was not within the scope of what the SEC had originally contemplated. In other words, this exemption, if introduced, does not mean that the various financial products associated with the block chain will be fully liberalized at the regulatory level.

However, in her view, the discussion was still seen as a step forward in the regulation of digital assets, although the actual scope of application might be narrower than the market expectations.