El Salvador's Top Crypto Regulator Meets US SEC: 'It Was Very Refreshing'
On April 22, CNAD El Salvador met with the SEC Cryptocurrency Task Force.
Tom Carreras | Edited by Cheyenne Ligon Updated April 25, 2025, 5:52 PM Published April 24, 2025, 7:29 PM
Key points:
- El Salvador to Create Cross-Border Crypto Regulatory Sandbox with US
- CNAD met with the SEC earlier this week.
- CNAD President Juan Carlos Reyes told CoinDesk that the discussions were productive.
The National Commission on Digital Assets (CNAD) of El Salvador, the body responsible for regulating digital assets in the Central American country, is seeking to create an international regulatory sandbox in partnership with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“We are focused on creating international cooperation,” Juan Carlos Reyes, president of CNAD, told CoinDesk. “Our main message is that digital assets have no geographical borders. Cooperation with regulators should also know no international barriers.”
El Salvador is in a unique situation, as it did not have strong financial institutions or even an existing developer ecosystem when President Nayib Bukele declared Bitcoin legal tender in 2021. This gave CNAD the opportunity to start from scratch by developing a regulatory framework tailored to cryptocurrencies.
Nearly two years after Reyes took over the agency, El Salvador's robust regulatory infrastructure has attracted crypto giants like Tether, Bitfinex, and Binance to open offices in the country.
The goal, Reyes said, is for the SEC to use El Salvador as a case study to evaluate streamlined digital asset regulation practices — in other words, for the SEC to learn from El Salvador's experience as it updates its own regulations in light of the post-Gensler changes.
The pilot initiative proposed by CNAD covers different scenarios: a US-licensed traditional financial broker obtains a digital asset license under CNAD rules, and the development of two small tokenization offerings organized by a CNAD-licensed tokenization company. Each scenario would be capped at $10,000.
These initiatives will help achieve some of the goals outlined by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce in February when she announced that the SEC's cryptocurrency task force, which she chairs, would now take a new approach to regulating cryptocurrencies.
“CNAD has really looked at [Pierce’s paper] in terms of how we can help,” Erica Perkin, owner of The Perkin Law Firm and a member of CNAD’s advisory group, told CoinDesk. “We’re here. There’s information that [the SEC] might want to collect. That’s hard to do in the U.S. … We’ve created a framework that’s flexible enough to work on the specific issues that the SEC is looking at, and we’re here to help and gather data on how we can best do that.”
On April 22, CNAD met with the SEC’s Cryptocurrency Working Group to discuss the initiative. According to Reyes and Perkin, the meeting was productive. “They asked reasonable questions,” Perkin said. “They are in the process of putting it together.”
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