The Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Gary Gensler has announced he will step down from his post on January 20 when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, even though his term officially only ends in 2026.
Under Gensler, the regulator has pushed to bring more transparency to the markets, but also led a crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry that saw the regulator sue numerous major firms in the space including Binance, Coinbase, Ripple and Kraken.
Despite the SEC’s pushes, the regulator has suffered numerous legal defeats, including one just hours before Gensler’s announcement after a federal court in Texas dismissed the regulator’s new rules for the $27 trillion Treasury market.
During his tenure, Gensler took a hard line on cryptocurrency, describing the sector as a “wild west” and refusing to craft bespoke regulations for digital assets, arguing instead that existing securities laws sufficed.
In a speech at the Aspen Security Forum, he said the asset class “is rife with fraud, scams, and abuse in certain applications,” adding there’s a “great deal of hype and spin about how crypto assets work.”
Despite his stance, under Gensler, the SEC approved both spot Bitcoin and spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) after numerous rejections, which made it easier for investors to gain exposure to these cryptocurrencies. His stance seemingly failed after a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruling said the SEC failed to adequately explain why it had initially rejected these funds.
Trump, who vowed to oust Gensler when he took office, is likely to nominate a successor that will pivot away from the SEC’s current stance on digital assets as he held a pro-crypto stance during his campaign.
