FOLLOW US

The U.S. has dropped the ball on crypto regulation and the knock-on effects of that failure keep her up at night says Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce.

“There’s a lot of fraud in this space, because it’s the hot area of the moment,” Peirce told CNBC on the sidelines of the DC Blockchain Summit this week. “The other piece that does concern me is the way that we’ve sort of dropped the regulatory ball.”

She added, “We’re not allowing innovation to develop and experimentation to happen in a healthy way, and there are long-term consequences of that failure.”

The comments come as the crypto market crash continues.

A large sell-off in digital assets has wiped out half a trillion dollars from the entire market in the space of a few weeks due to the stock market sell-off and TerraUSD crash. 

Stablecoins are digital currencies that are coded and designed to be stable, with values pegged to the price of real-world assets such as commodities like gold, or fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.

“We can go after fraud and we can play a more positive role on the innovation side, but we have to get to it, we’ve got to get working,” said Peirce.

“I haven’t seen us willing to do that work so far.”

“The crypto exchanges should come in and register,” continued Gensler on Capitol Hill last week, “Or, frankly, we’re going to continue to bring, use what Congress has given us, in our enforcement and examination functions.”

Gensler also recently told House lawmakers that the rules are “actually quite clear.”