Peirce will head President Trump’s Crypto Task Force.She will be again working with Paul Atkins at the SEC, whom she served under as a lawyer 20 years ago.She wants to see looser regulations across the board for digital assets.Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce has become a favourite among the crypto industry thanks to her views on free markets and digital assets.Affectionately dubbed “crypto mom” for her pro-industry stance, Peirce was named as head of the Trump Administration’s Crypto Task Force, a move welcomed by industry leaders.“Too often, we as regulators jump in and say, I’m going to tell you what to do with your life,” Peirce told DL News last year. “I’m not your mom.”No, Peirce is a lawyer and bureaucrat, having served in Washington since the turn of the century. After graduating from Yale Law School, Peirce spent the first three years of her career clerking for US Court of Federal Claims and in private practice at WilmerHale.Peirce first landed at her current home of the SEC in 2000, working as a staff attorney in the Division of Investment Enforcement before serving for then-Commissioner Paul Atkins, who is now poised to become her boss again as chair of the SEC.Peirce then transitioned to Congress, working as a senior counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.At the time of her nomination as SEC commissioner by President Barack Obama in 2015, Peirce was working as a Senior Research Fellow and Director at George Mason University. While that nomination stalled out, she was re-nominated by Trump in 2017 and confirmed. Her current term, which began in 2020, ends in June of this year.Her views have remained consistently pro-market. In an editorial for The New York Times in 2013, Peirce argued against government intervention on banks while throwing a slight haymaker towards the Federal Reserve.“The only virtue of having government directly engaged in banking is that it’s more honest than the current system, in which government pulls the strings of purportedly private banks,” she wrote at the time.Peirce’s views on cryptocurrencies started to come into sharp focus around 2021, when she presented a proposal, Safe Harbor 2.0.In it, she floated giving token launches regulatory clarity through an approach similar to the legal regime governing user uploads to platforms like YouTube, which indemnifies a digital platform from the copyright abuses of users.The proposal received support from the industry but never penetrated much past Peirce’s own GitHub page.Last year, Peirce lamented to DL News the shuttering of LBRY and Stoner Cats, two crypto projects she saw as having succumbed to SEC overreach via settlement or litigation.In a letter published Tuesday titled “The Journey Begins,” Peirce again reiterated her pro-crypto positioning, writing that the SEC’s “handling of crypto has been marked by legal imprecision and commercial impracticality.”It’s a
Gio. Feb 6th, 2025
