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For the first time in history, a sitting SEC Chairman addressed a Bitcoin conference. Paul Atkins used the moment to speak about regulatory limits, political risk, and why the Clarity Act is not just important but essential to protecting everything the current administration has built for crypto.
The SEC Cannot Do This Alone
He said that the SEC operates under authority that is, in his own words, “basically a 1930s type of thing.” It can be nimble. It can coordinate with the CFTC. But it cannot create lasting certainty without Congress.
“Nothing futureproofs things like a statute,” Atkins said, “and then good opinions from courts to chisel what the statute says into stone.”
Without new legislation, he explained, everything the current SEC has built rests on guidance and goodwill rather than law. That matters enormously when political winds shift.
The Next Administration Is the Real Threat
Atkins acknowledged directly what the industry fears most. A future administration hostile to crypto, backed by a statute that defaults new projects to securities classification, would have tools the Biden-era SEC never had.
“Elections have consequences and can be huge,” he said. “Who would have thought ten years ago that we would have this complete 180-degree pivot pretty much by the US government?”
The flip side of that pivot is obvious. What one administration builds, the next can dismantle. Without a statute locking the framework in place, the progress of the past two years has no permanent foundation.
The SEC, Atkins said, is “focused on trying to streamline things, trying to make things more efficient, trying to help innovators innovate so that they can do so with certainty and then not get picked off by folks who are jealously guarding their turf from existing ways of doing things.”
The Timeline and What Needs to Happen
Movement in the Senate is expected in May. A vote could follow in June. From there the bill would need to pass the House and reach the president’s desk.
“A lot of things have to happen. A lot of things have to line up in order for all that to happen, which of course we’re hoping happens, but that is not guaranteed,” he said.
For those who have watched previous legislative cycles come close and stall, the caution is familiar. But the stakes, Atkins made clear, have never been higher.
Tokenised Equities: The Next Frontier
Atkins pointed to tokenised equities as a major near-term opportunity where the SEC sits at a critical position to enable or obstruct innovation. Traditional equity settlement passes through multiple intermediaries, each collecting fees between a trade’s execution and its final settlement. Blockchain could eliminate much of that friction.
“The commission sits at a really important position to enable this innovation to take place,” he said, while acknowledging the challenge of navigating stakeholders whose business models depend on the current structure.