The founder of the Chamber of Digital Commerce has slammed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being what she described as a “blocker” to the development of the crypto industry.
The Chamber of Digital Commerce is an American crypto advocacy group and one of the leading trade associations representing the digital asset industry.
“It’s very clear that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is the number one blocker to this industry having economic progress and springing an economic boom in this country that we haven’t seen in decades,” founder Perianne Boring said at the Blockchain Summit in Washington, according to a report from Blockworks.
Boring said that the SEC needs to define what a digital asset security is and that the industry can’t go on without any clear guidelines.
At the time of Boring’s comments, the SEC still hasn’t approved a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), only approving several futures-based products which much of the industry isn’t exactly impressed with given their voodoo-like formula for pricing and its tendency to suck capital away from BTC.
“How do we have futures ETFs but not a spot ETF?” Boring said. “It doesn’t make sense, and it’s often harming investors in an incredible way.”
Kathy Kraninger, vice president of regulatory affairs at Solidus Labs, a crypto-native risk monitoring and market surveillance firm, threw some shade on President Biden’s recent executive order.
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According to Kraninger, the executive order was more of a fact-finding mission rather than definable regulatory clarity.
“The notion that we’re going to solve everything for blockchain or for digital assets through this executive order…that’s a lot of expectation that will be disappointed,” Kraninger said.
Sulolit Mukherjee, vice president and global head of tax at Binance, said he sympathized with the difficult job that regulators had. Mukherjee had this to say:
“I’m not saying that they’re not going to be useful, but education is an ongoing moving target in the blockchain space.“
“I empathize with the challenges of the folks in these agencies who now have to sort of go out there learn this technology, keep up with the tremendously fast pace of innovation and then come up with recommendations.”
“It’s a long game, I think it’s going to take a while before we get full clarity of what the regulatory framework is going to look like.”
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of San Francisco-based Ripple Labs which is in the middle of a lawsuit with the SEC, said on Tuesday that the US regulatory environment was somewhere between “hostile” and uncertain.
“In terms of regulatory certainty, the US is behind other countries. There is much better clarity in Japan, Singapore and Switzerland to invest,” he said.
