SEC Will Be Forced to Give More Guidance About Crypto: Peirce

Oct 10, 2020 at 18:59 UTCUpdated Oct 10, 2020 at 19:02 UTC.U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce, well known for her pro-cryptocurrencies views, said increased interest in the space will necessarily force the regulatory body to shift toward a more accommodating stance, according to a recent interview with Cointelegraph.

"While we've been very slow in giving guidance, there is more and more interest from a wide spectrum of people, both inside the crypto space as well as inside the traditional financial institutions who are asking us for guidance," Peirce said.

"So I think we're going to be forced to confront that more and more in the coming years."

Peirce also said that pro-crypto moves in the U.S. by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as well as actions by regulators in other countries are also slowly prodding the SEC into action.

While there are a lot of people at the SEC who want the body to become more innovation-friendly, the regulator's bureaucracy acts as an impediment to change and discourages risk-taking, Peirce said.

The number of people interested in innovation and in crypto at the SEC is "Growing," she said.

The commissioner also said Congress needs to be thinking about smart contracts and decentralized finance so it can give the SEC directives on how it wants the regulator to handle them.

Peirce said that while she hopes the SEC will revisit its decisions to reject BTC Exchange-Traded Funds, she declined to predict whether the regulator will ever approve them, saying the SEC seems to have made up its own standards just for BTC.Though the commissioner called the prospect of a digital dollar "Likely," that's not where she says the real action is.

"I think a lot of the really interesting innovation is happening outside sort of the central bank digital currency space."