The President of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Paul Atkins, examines during his swearing-up ceremony at the White House in Washington, DC, United States, April 22, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
Washington – SEC President Paul Atkins said on Friday that innovation in the cryptography industry “has been suffocated for several years” and that changes are cruelly necessary.
“The market itself seems to indicate that the current framework does not care about attention,” said Atkins during a round table held by the recently launched Crypto working group.
The half-day session at the SEC headquarters in Washington, DC, is a notable event for Atkins, and only comes a few weeks after the SEC has officially abandoned its long-standing trial against Ripple, a symbolic end to a four-year battle between the regulator and the cryptographic industry. Crypto chiefs, regulators and legal experts were on site to discuss mainly the question of the custody or the safeguarding of digital assets.
Atkins presented the opening remarks alongside the SEC commissioners, Caroline Crenshaw, Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce. The group tries to set the tone for a new era of cryptographic regulation, which seeks to change the approach of the opponent to collaborative.
The cryptography industry was essential to the electoral victory of President Donald Trump in November, pumping money in his campaign as well as to support the candidates of the Congress considered friendly to his efforts, after four tumultuous years during the presidency of Joe Biden.
President Trump has since taken many measures to repay the industry, signing an executive decree to create a strategic bitcoin reserve and forgive three co-founders of the Bitmex Global cryptocurrency exchange as well as the founder of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.
The dry has followed suit. In January, he canceled the staff accounting bulletin 121, a rule established under the previous President Gary Gensler who treated assets in cryptography as well as balance sheets for banks and effectively blocked institutional adoption. Peirce celebrated the rollback on X at the time by writing, “Goodbye, goodbye Sab 121! It's not fun.”
And in February, the sec was published advice To say that he does not consider most of the memes coins under the American federal law.
It is a big boon for the president and his family members, who have several lucrative cryptography projects on the market. President Trump – $ Trump's personal memes play – was announced just before the inauguration in January and currently has a market capitalization of around 2.7 billion dollars. The project website claims that 80% of the tokens supply is held by the Trump organization and the affiliated entities.
The Friday round table included business leaders such as Digital Bank, Fidelity Digital Assets, Kraken, Bitgo, Exodus, Fireblocks and Copper Technologies. They described the legal and operational roadblocks to the supply of cryptography guard solutions in accordance with federal securities.
Crypto custody refers to how digital assets are held. Some investors prefer to have their own assets with private keys stored on hardware portfolios, or “cold storage”, compared to the use of the cryptographic brokerage company – “hot wallets” – and other third -party options.
A clear lack of regulatory directives makes it difficult to know which options are legal and also creates challenges to provide guarantees in a market that has seen its hacks share.
“”A regulatory approach should recognize that the differences between qualified guards exist for certain cryptographic assets, “Peirce said at the event of Friday.” But for others, self-garde could be the safest option. “”
The SEC weighs the revisions of its controversial guard rule, proposed for the first time under peopleler, that many in the cryptography industry affirm were impassable for the assets based on the blockchain. The proposal stuck and the signals of the Friday round table renewed the interest of finding a compromise.
However, tensions remain between the need for investor protection and the practical realities of obtaining decentralized assets.
“”The commission must attack these problems, “said Peirce.” If we do not do so, we prevent regulated entities from serving their customers. “”
WATCH: Trump's Liberty Finnish Project World Project said that it had sold $ 550 million in tokens
