This piece originally appeared in RealClearPolicy.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairmen of both parties, Jay Clayton and Gary Gensler, have asserted regulatory power over digital assets and blockchain. They pursued a ruinous “regulation by enforcement” policy to punish innovators like Ripple, LBRY, Grayscale and Coinbase, while they coddled criminals like Sam Bankman-Fried. Courts have pushed back, but only in those cases where litigants have the resources to fight the SEC, but there is no recourse for victim companies or individuals. The SEC is still immune to civil liability (what US House Rep. Todd Tiahrt calls “appalling bad faith”). Only Congress or the White House can stop the SEC’s illegal runaway regulatory train.
Publicly available evidence points to rampant conflicts of interest and ethical questions around senior SEC officials. Clayton and former Director of Corporation Finance William Hinman were revealed to have financial incentives to favor Ethereum over the rival network XRP, and the two officials moved to give the former a regulatory pass and file a blockbuster lawsuit against the latter on Clayton’s final day in office (Full disclosure: I filed a legal motion to compel the release of some of those documents which exposed Hinman’s conflicts.)
Gensler met with Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX while the latter was carrying out what U.S. Attorney Damian Williams called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history”. But Gensler hadn’t put FTX under anything like the non-fraud civil wrecking ball he unleashed on the small New Hampshire-based startup LBRY.
