When he appeared on CNBC on Wednesday, former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler made his first comment on the agency’s lightning abandonment of the enforcement case against a prominent cryptocurrency company.
As reported by U.Today, the agency has decided to withdraw its appeal against Ripple and withdraw its high-stakes litigation against Kraken, Coinbase and other major companies in the industry.
“As you probably saw, many CEOs were doing almost a victory lap in the crypto world as these enforcement cases were dropped by this current administration… What did you think?” CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin said.
Gensler declined to discuss specific cases, claiming that “almost 99%” in the crypto sector is based on sentiment.
He added that “something like Bitcoin” may last for a long time due to the fact that there is “real sharp interest.”
“If this is just an emotion, in general, they don’t work and most of them go down,” he said.
Gensler then compared the cryptocurrency sector with precious metals.
“We only have two or three precious metals. We humans have a certain appeal to two or three precious metals like gold. We humans don’t think we humans will be fascinated by 10 or 15,000 memes and sentiment tokens over the years,” the former SEC boss added.
Of course, Gensler approved the launch of Bitcoin ETFs in the US, increasing the level of institutional acceptance of major cryptocurrencies.
However, he is still remembered as the archenemy of the crypto industry as the SEC’s controversial “enforcement-based regulatory” approach led to famous incidents against many crypto companies.
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