SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce on New Cryptocurrency Task Force
A longtime SEC commissioner shares his plans to change the agency's approach to regulating digital assets.
Author: Nikhilesh De | Edited by: Stephen Alpher Updated: Mar 15, 2025 3:17 AM UTC Published: Mar 15, 2025 1:30 PM UTC
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, the newly appointed leader of the regulator’s cryptocurrency task force, has long been an advocate for the crypto industry as one of the Republicans serving on the federal securities regulator. She discussed her views with CoinDesk in late February.
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“The Right Ship”
Narrative
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce spoke to CoinDesk on February 28, 2025, hours before US President Donald Trump announced a White House summit on cryptocurrency.
Why is this important?
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is one of the primary regulators overseeing the country’s cryptocurrency sector and has come under considerable criticism. Pierce, who has served as commissioner since 2018, is now seeking to overhaul the regulator’s approach to the entire industry. As part of that effort, the SEC is hosting a cryptocurrency policy event on March 21.
Let's break this down
To be honest, the last five weeks have been pretty eventful, especially since President Donald Trump took office again. The main focus in your world is the new crypto task force that you are leading, which is about the crypto industry. To start, I hope you can talk about what you have seen, done, and heard so far, and what you expect from it.
Yeah, let me start with my standard disclaimer: My views are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SEC or my colleagues. I think it’s been a fascinating five weeks, and I’m pleased that Chairman [Mark] Ueda has launched the task force, giving us the opportunity to look at a lot of these issues in a holistic way. We’ve made some significant progress already, and I’m glad about that. We’ve got a great team, a lot of really smart people working hard. Our goal is to think about things that we can just rule out and say to people, “That’s not in our jurisdiction.” If Congress wants to expand our jurisdiction, that’s fine, but that’s not it.
Then, in terms of what is within our jurisdiction, we need to identify what we can do in the short term to provide some clarity or a path forward so that people don't feel like they can't do anything for fear that it might be within our jurisdiction. So let's offer clear paths forward.
This could be a temporary measure to fill in the gaps until legislation or regulation comes in and then address some of the longer term issues around securities tokenization and what that looks like for a broker-dealer or a trading platform that is trying to deal with securities alongside non-securities. Some of these more complex issues will take time to resolve and we are looking to do it in a way that engages the public. We want people to be able to come and have a conversation.
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