THELOGICALINDIAN - n-a
The Securities and Exchange Commission is affective afterpiece to regulation. Valerie Szczepanik, the Head of the SEC’s Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group, was animated to the anew created position of Senior Advisor for Digital Assets and Innovation. In her new capacity, she will admonish the Division of Corporation Finance on cryptocurrencies, ICOs and added blockchain-related inventions.
The arrangement had the internet abuzz with rumors of the new “Crypto-Czar” but there’s no assurance that the Cossacks are advancing aloof yet. If anything, Mrs. Szczepanik’s arrangement should be account for alert optimism, and a assurance that the SEC is aggravating to accept cryptocurrency offerings rather than abbreviate them.
The new Senior Advisor is not a complete drifter to the crypto-world, accepting already represented the SEC at forums like Consensus. “Whether or not you are adapted by the SEC, you still accept fiduciary duties to your investors,” she told audiences at Consensus 2017. “If you appetite this industry to flourish, aegis of investors should be at the forefront.” That may not complete like a balderdash flag, but it’s a lot added favorable than the signals from Jay “every ICO I’ve apparent is a security” Clayton.
Explaining the SEC’s anxiety on antecedent bread offerings, Szczepanik told Consensus: “One actual alive breadth that we’re attractive at is the arising of tokens or bill on a blockchain —typically you’ll see a lot on the ethereum blockchain—issued beneath the ERC-20 protocol…We’re attractive at those actual anxiously to actuate if that accident defines the arising of a security.” The actuality that the new Crypto-Adviser knows what an ERC-20 is, should be account for some relief.
The arrangement may be a assurance that banking regulators are alpha to thaw on cryptocurrencies, abnormally as arch exchanges like Coinbase footfall up to their acknowledged obligations. Last ages the SEC trolled the crypto apple with “Howeycoins,” a affected ICO betray whose focus was on educating the accessible rather than calumniating cryptocurrencies.
In a appointment on Financial Fraud beforehand this year, Mrs. Szczepanik stated that “We do not appetite to arctic the markets…the affiance of blockchain technology is not one that we appetite to ignore.”
That may complete like arena to the audience, but Mrs. Szczepanik has announced the aforementioned way to centralized crowds as well. In 2016, as arch of the SEC’s Digital Ledger Group, she presided over a diffuse console altercation which put more emphasis on cultivating new shoots than contagion the weeds. After giving regulators a cogent introduction to acute affairs and blockchains, she declared that “our mission is to assure the markets and investors, but also, we don’t appetite to arrest the appearance of new technology that can advice investors.”
However, the actuality that regulators are assuming a hardly lighter blow should not be admired as a blooming ablaze for the Bitconnects and Bitcoiins. Mrs. Szczepanik has already apparent little absolution for unregistered securities, and as aboriginal as 2014 oversaw an analysis into a then-unknown “Bitcoin Entrepreneur” called Erik Voorhees. The analysis led to absolute fines and disgorgements beyond $50,000—a ample number, in 2014. Since again the anatomy has apparent little absolution back it came to chastening ICOs.
All of which suggests that the cryptocurrency would should not apprehend any chargeless passes from the new SEC regime, nor should it appetite them. But the arrangement of a Cryptocurrency Advisor whose accessible statements adjust added with attention investors than attractive for whipping-boys, and who seems added absorbed in crafting adapted regulations than in jamming new pegs into old aboveboard holes, is apparently a assurance of advance in the relations amid crypto-businesses and their regulators.
At the actual least, it should be account to stop panicking whenever the SEC breathes too heavily.
Disclaimer: The Author is invested in Ethereum.
