Ripple Execs Concerned About SEC's Enforcement Approach in Lawsuit Verdict

On Wednesday, the Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, testified at the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government. During the hearing, Gensler requested a budget of approximately $2.436 billion for the commission’s operations during the financial year 2024.

Moreover, the SEC has presented several lawsuits, mostly against crypto-related companies, including Ripple Labs, on securities enforcement.

According to Gensler, the Commission has rules on securities, which most crypto-related companies have not complied with in the past. As a result, enforcement into the trillion-dollar industry is paramount to protect investors, according to the chair.

As Chair of @SECGov, I have one goal with regard to the crypto markets: to ensure that investors and the markets receive all the protections that they would in any other securities market. How?
Read my op-ed in @thehill:
— Gary Gensler (@GaryGensler) March 9, 2023

Gensler’s Take On Crypto to Congress

During yesterday’s hearing, Gensler reiterated that all crypto assets apart from Bitcoin are unregistered securities. Moreover, the Chair insisted that people and websites are working on the prosperity of most crypto coins.

“Crypto tokens—without prejudging any one of them—you could look at nearly most of them, and you could find a group of entrepreneurs with a Twitter site, with a website, with individuals, and I can bet that most of you are not visited by decentralised, non-existent management,” Gensler insisted.

According to market data from Coingecko, over 11k cryptocurrencies are available for trading on various centralized and decentralized exchanges. As a result, Gensler told the House Subcommittee that only a few tokens are completely decentralized. Recently, Gensler insisted that Ethereum and its ERC-20 market consist of unregistered securities.

“Frankly, of the ten or twelve thousand tokens, there are very few that don’t have a group of entrepreneurs in the middle that the public is counting on,” he added.

Experts Take

With cryptocurrency widely spread worldwide, crypto companies in the United States insist the country risks losing its share of the nascent technology to other financial hubs like the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and UAE. According to Susan Friedman, Head of Public Policy at Ripple, Congress should not help the SEC cripple the industry through enforcement.

The SEC’s focus on enforcement over clarity is hurting markets, not helping them, and crippling capital formation in the US. Here’s hoping Congress takes a critical look at this budget request rather than support the SEC’s ever-ballooning bureaucracy.
— Susan Friedman (@ss_friedman) March 29, 2023

Source: https://coinpedia.org/ripple/ripple-execs-concerned-about-secs-enforcement-approach-in-lawsuit-verdict/