SEC Chair Gary Gensler continued to take shots at crypto on his way out the door Wednesday, echoing previous comments as he again characterized the industry as “rife with bad actors.”
When asked in a televised interview with Bloomberg whether criminal cases against the likes of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, and Terra ecosystem creator Do Kwon deterred unethical behavior in the crypto industry, Gensler appeared to imply that the very premise of blockchain technology could be inherently illegal.
“It’s a field that was built up around noncompliance,” the outgoing SEC chief said, smiling.
Gensler went on to state that whereas most financial products he’s worked with in his four-decade career have always traded on a mixture of fundamentals and sentiment, crypto still appears to him to be an asset class uniquely lacking in substance.
“I’ve never seen a field that’s so much wrapped up in sentiment, and not so much about fundamentals,” he said of digital assets.
Gensler is set to leave office on January 20, the same day that Donald Trump will begin his second presidential term. During his tenure, the SEC chair led an aggressive crusade against all manner of crypto-related firms and projects.
Trump’s pick for Gensler’s replacement, the former SEC commissioner Paul Atkins, is widely expected to reverse the current SEC’s crypto-hostile stance.
During Wednesday’s interview, Gensler made a point to try to color his SEC’s current crypto skepticism as nonpartisan and generally unremarkable—by invoking the fact that his Republican predecessor, Jay Clayton, went after almost as many crypto projects as Gensler did.
“When Jay was trying to address it, he brought 80 enforcement actions in this area,” Gensler said, referring to allegedly illegal behavior in crypto. “We’ve brought about 100 in our four years, which is consistent.”
Gensler, though, has attracted a particularly intensive amount of vitriol from the crypto community over the last four years due to his aggressive positions on the legality and merit of blockchain technology.
When asked today how he felt about the intensity of those attacks during his tenure, Gensler appeared indifferent, saying it came with the territory.
“If you’re not willing to be attacked, you can’t go into the public square and debate policy,” he said, quoting his former boss Hillary Clinton.
The outgoing regulator added that he’s not too worried about the crypto sector, given he thinks its appeal remains marginal.
“I think the public is probably aware of this,” he said of the risks he believes are endemic to crypto. “And less than 10% of the public invests in this field.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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