This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched two major legal actions against Binance and Coinbase, accusing the exchanges of flouting U.S. securities laws.
At the heart of this offensive is one man: Gary Gensler, who was appointed chair of the SEC in February 2021.
Gensler today looks like the crypto industry’s worst enemy, issuing what sounds like a blanket disavowal of crypto’s whole point of being. “We don’t need more digital currency…we already have a digital currency, it’s called the U.S. dollar,” Gensler said Tuesday, June 6.
“We have not seen, over the centuries, that economies and the public need more than one way to move value.”
But Gensler wasn’t always so trenchant a critic.
Before he started in the SEC hot seat, he was fresh from teaching courses on digital currency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and consulting with that school’s Digital Currency Initiative.
Here was the tone that Gensler struck in an op-ed for CoinDesk in December 2019: “Though literally thousands of projects have yet to land on broadly adopted use cases, I remain intrigued by Satoshi’s innovation’s potential to spur change – either directly or indirectly as a catalyst. The potential to lower verification and networking costs is worth pursuing, particularly to lower economic rents and data privacy costs, and promote economic inclusion."
“Further, shared blockchain applications might help jumpstart multiparty network solutions in fields that historically have been fragmented or resilient to change. Even in this slightly less ambitious form – acting as an innovative irritant to incumbents and traditional technologies – cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have already prompted real change and can continue to do so," he added.