By cryptoadmin Today is Hester Peirce’s last day as an SEC Commissioner. The digital asset industry, and every American who believes regulation should mitigate risk and foster innovation, owes her an enormous debt of gratitude.
For more than eight years, Commissioner Peirce served as a principled voice at the Commission. Under the previous SEC Chairman, she frequently dissented when the Commission chose to bring enforcement actions rather than write rules the industry could comply with. She proposed a token safe harbor years before regulators were ready to listen. She led the Crypto Task Force and insisted that the agency’s duty to protect investors meant it must use its authority to provide regulatory guardrails for the rapidly expanding industry.
Commissioner Peirce brought humility, conviction, and a sense of humor to work every day. Washington could use more like her. Although she will no longer be at the SEC, her presence and the ideals she stood for will live on.
Will Schwartz is a Policy Associate at Blockchain Association, where he conducts research and analysis on digital asset legislation, regulation, and emerging policy developments.
Commissioner Peirce’s work is not done yet
In some of her last public remarks as Commissioner, at SIFMA’s Digital Assets Conference on September 23, Peirce did not take a victory lap. Rather, she outlined the work that is still to be done—even in her absence. As she described in her speech, our society is at a great crossroads. Down one road is the world we’ve been living in: dragnet surveillance, the datafication of every aspect of life, and cybersecurity breaches that expose our most sensitive information to bad actors all around the world. Down the other is a world of both privacy and security, where Americans can prove that they’re following the law without handing over their sensitive personal information.
Commissioner Peirce has firsthand experience seeing how our financial regulations are designed to extract as much personal data from American consumers as possible. For more than 50 years, our regulatory framework has been built upon the mass collection and storage of personal data from all Americans who interact with the financial system. Businesses collect personal data from consumers and share it with the government, which aims to track down actual criminal activity — the “needle,” as Commissioner Peirce puts it, in the “haystack” of innocent, unassuming Americans’ data.