WASHINGTON, D.C. — The staff at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has embraced the chance to finally work with the crypto industry to hash out policy for overseeing digital assets transactions, said Commissioner Hester Peirce, the head of the agency’s crypto task force.
The securities regulator is ready “to seek earnestly to find a workable framework,” Peirce said at the agency’s first crypto-focused roundtable on Friday. “I think we’re ready for the spring ahead,” she said, referring to the title of the day’s event, the “Spring Sprint Toward Crypto Clarity.”
The task, according to Peirce: “Can we translate the characteristics of a security into a simple taxonomy that will cover the many different types of crypto assets that exist today and may exist in the future?”
Mark Uyeda, the agency’s acting chairman, told reporters that despite recent SEC policy statements that certain areas of the crypto sector aren’t subject to securities laws — memecoins and mining, so far — it’s a “definitely possibility” that others will be defined as securities.
“We’re moving on multiple tracks here,” he said in answer to a question from CoinDesk. Each statement issued so far “ultimately is a staff statement” that doesn’t have legal backing, but he said the roundtable represents the entire commission — currently three members — looking at what a “potential commission interpretation might look like.”
In his opening remarks at the event, Uyeda, who was appointed by President Donald Trump as the SEC awaits a Senate confirmation of Paul Atkins, argued that the agency should have been more willing in recent years to make such interpretations public.
“When judicial opinions have created uncertainty from our participants in the past, the commission and its staff have stepped in to provide guidance,” Uyeda said. “This approach of using common rulemaking for explaining the commission’s process or releases rather than enforcement actions, should have been considered for classifying crypto assets under the federal security laws.”
Panel discussion
The panel discussion saw a dozen securities attorneys in the crypto sector weigh in on the specific issues they saw as they advised companies.
“What’s the biggest question that you face in trying to wrestle with this question?,” moderator Troy Paredes, a former SEC commissioner who now runs consulting firm Paredes Strategies, asked Sarah Brennan, the general counsel at Delphi Ventures and one of the 11 panelists.
“The specter of the application of securities laws has moved early-stage projects in the market to sort of take an arc very similar to [initial public offerings], where they stay private longer,” she replied.
“These assets in the traditional model are designed to have wide, broad early distribution and most of the market is hedging that on the application of securities laws, so it ends up looking a lot like your traditional markets where people will marshal their way to an exchange listing without that broad dissemination or price support or actually fully launching the technology.”
The panel featured critics of the industry alongside attorneys who have worked to develop the sector.
“Whether you’re talking yield farms or ostrich farms or orange groves, the whole point of securities regulation was to wrap that all up into a very big, broad, principles-based regulation,” former SEC attorney John Reed Stark said. His concern is that, even in 2025, much of the market lacks utility.
“If it all went away tomorrow and you weren’t speculating in it, you wouldn’t care,” he said.
Legislator questions
Ahead of the roundtable, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jake Auchincloss, both Massachusetts Democrats, wrote an open letter to Uyeda asking about the SEC’s staff statement on memecoins and how it was developed.
The letter asked whether anyone at the SEC communicated with the White House about the statement, whether the White House’s crypto working group had directed the SEC to do anything and why the staff statement was not built into formal rulemaking.
Warren and Auchincloss also asked the SEC to explain how it would specifically define memecoins as distinct from “general cryptocurrency,” how it would distinguish between actual memecoins and memecoins that don’t meet the staff statement, and which memecoins the SEC analyzed in drafting its staff statement.
NFTs next?
Peirce told reporters on the event’s sidelines that a next possibility for another agency crypto policy statement (following recent statements for memecoins and mining) could be non-fungible tokens. She said NFTs could probably benefit from clarity on the agency’s thinking.
“I think we’ll see that we could do it on NFTs, as well,” she told reporters on the sidelines of the agency’s crypto roundtable on Friday. “We could have done that a long time ago.”
When asked by CoinDesk whether non-binding, unofficial staff statements are the way to approach policy signals from the agency, she said this is a response to recent years in which the agency was reticent to talk about any of it.
“There is certainly a role for notice-and-comment rulemaking. but I think not when you’re just saying, ‘This is how we’re looking at the law,'” she said. “You don’t need that.”
She also addressed reports that federal budget slashing will lead to a cut of SEC staff of hundreds of people.
“It’s always sad to me when you lose someone with a lot of experience, but people do come and go from the SEC,” she said. “They do retire, and so we have to have a deep bench.”
UPDATE (March 21, 2025, 20:12 UTC): Adds comments from Hester Peirce.
