“It doesn’t have to be done in the form of regulation,” 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 authority that it uses regularly. “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 new policy as “an innovation exemption intended to facilitate limited trading of certain tokenized securities with the goal of developing a long-term regulatory framework.” He said it would be “limited in time and scope, but long enough for us to develop more sustainable rules that harness the full potential of these new technologies.”
More recently, in May, he added: “I also think we should think about what an evolving framework might look like, one that would take the form of notice and comment regulation and address the definition of ‘exchange’ as applied to on-chain trading systems.”
CoinDesk interviewed several attorneys who are former SEC officials, asking about the choice to delay formal rulemaking and whether interim work on it will hold up. Most agreed that the approach may not have the strongest authority of the SEC, but that it would still be difficult to put the toothpaste back in the tube if the next administration sees things differently.
