gm Bankless Nation, with Gary Gensler's SEC tenure ending, the next Commission chair has the opportunity to be much friendlier to digital assets—including non-fungible ones.
gm Bankless Nation, With Gary Gensler's SEC tenure likely coming to a close soon, the next Commission chair has the opportunity to be much friendlier to digital assets—including non-fungible ones.
Today's Issue ⬇️
🧊 News Roundup: NFT Regulatory Thaw What comes next under new SEC leadership?
📚 Learn:What I'm Reading My favorite posts this week.
With a new incoming presidential administration, Biden's SEC chair Gary Gensler is likely on the way out at the SEC.
Arguably no public official has ever been as widely disdained in crypto as Gensler, who seemingly took the most aggressive and unforgiving positions possible against token projects during his tenure.
More than a few of these projects, of course, were NFT-centric. For example, the Commission recently issued Wells Notices to OpenSea and Immutable. Gensler's SEC also charged Impact Theory, Stoner Cats, and Flyfish Club with unregistered securities sales via NFTs.
This hostile environment has been lambasted by dissenting SEC commissioners like Hester Peirce on multiple occasions (1, 2, 3, etc.). It's also led to artists suing the Commission for clarity on whether digital artworks sold via NFTs are securities.
Now there's the chance to turn the page upon Gensler's departure, but what would this look like?
It remains to be seen who will become the new SEC chair. Early reports suggest Dan Gallagher, a former SEC commissioner and the current chief legal officer of Robinhood, is in the mix. Whoever gets the nod, we can presume they'll be much friendlier to crypto and NFTs than Gensler was.
That said, the new SEC chair won't have unilateral power to fix all the regulatory woes around digital assets in the U.S. That will likely require Congress passing multiple pieces of legislation. But they will be able to set agency enforcement priorities, like deprioritizing token cases.
In the meantime, we lack specifics. We don't know who the SEC chair will be, we don't know what crypto legislation Congress might propose, and we don't know what pace to expect here.
There's also the scenario in which Gensler refuses to resign and, thanks to the SEC's independence, his departure drags on for months or longer with a protracted legal battle. That's another possibility that complicates predictions here.
In any case, what most people are expecting next is a fast regulatory thaw around crypto and NFTs. We'll have to wait and see if the new powers that be deliver on these expectations, or if the action is slow here amid non-crypto issues being more prioritized. Only time will tell for now.
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