SEC Commissioner Hester “Crypto Mom” Peirce disagreed and dissented from the SEC’s decision to shut down Kraken’s staking program.
Maybe ‘disagree’ and ‘dissent’ are not good enough words to describe what she wrote in her rebuttal.
Commissioners use a certain decorum and style in their statements, very governmenty sounding with fancy-schmancy speaking and writing styles.
Read between the lines, though, and Crypto Mom’s response was the equivalent of a fist to the face.
Commissioner Peirce suggested that agreeing with the SEC’s decision (or not) probably wouldn’t have mattered: “Whether one agrees with that analysis or not, the more fundamental question is whether SEC registration would have been possible.”
She argued that there are myriad issues with staking, such as whether the whole program should be registered or if only some tokens should be registered. And what disclosures there would be.
Crypto Mom then winds up a sock full of nickels. She writes, “Instead of taking the path of thinking through staking programs and issuing guidance, we again chose to speak through an enforcement action, purporting to “make clear to the marketplace that staking-as-a-service providers must register and provide full, fair, and truthful disclosure and investor protection.”
And then another sock full of Washington’s comes down, “Most concerning, though, is that our solution to a registration violation is to shut down entirely a program that has served people well.”🥊
And then, the coup de grace, the body slam, the suplex, the curb stomp to end all curb stomps:
A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement: do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.
You can read the full statement from Commissioner Hester M. Peirce here.