SEC Chairman Gary Gensler: Many Tokens Other Than XRP Are Securities
When we talk about the ongoing legal battle between the SEC and Ripple, both sides are debating why XRP is a security and why it is not. To avoid such ambiguity, there is clearly an urgent need for crypto rules, as SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce has repeatedly asked for crypto regulations.
Recently appointed SEC Chairman Gary Gensler also spoke about cryptocurrency regulations in a recent interview with CNBC.
He said:
“I think to the extent something is security the SEC has a lot of authority and a lot of crypto tokens — I won’t call them cryptocurrencies for this moment — are indeed securities. The prior Chair indicated that. The prior SEC brought numerous enforcement actions to sort of bring some of those security or investment contract tokens into the rules, but there are some like Bitcoin.”
Gensler added about Bitcoin and crypto markets:
“If I can just focus on that — and that’s about half of this two trillion dollar asset class right now — it’s a digital scarce store of value, but highly volatile, and there are investors that want to trade that and trade that for its volatility, in some cases just for its lower correlation with other markets.”
For Investor Protection He said:
“So if an investor wants to trade on that Bitcoin, understanding it’s highly volatile, highly speculative, but if they want to trade on that, we haven’t placed some investor protection, and that’s what I was saying. I think there is a gap in our system right now.”
Watch CNBC Video:
Originally published at https://thecryptobasic.com on May 11, 2021.
