As the SEC advances its pro-crypto agenda under the Second Donald Trump administration, the sole Democratic secretary of the agency has begun openly questioning whether the sector is currently being promoted to a disproportionate degree by the committee.
The regulator’s fourth crypto-center roundtable has its first roundtable since March. Blockchain Network, SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw questioned whether the assumption of hosting a traditional financial company at the agency’s headquarters would discuss how blockchain technology should be adopted.
In recent months, former Democrat SEC appointees have begun to openly question the motivations behind the Republican recent code embrace. Weak consumer protection In traditional financial markets.
“No one seems to agree that the SEC should remain a high-tech neutral regulator,” Crenshaw said Monday. “So why is it our place to evaluate a particular form of blockchain as a candidate for industrial adoption? Why focus on blockchain over other types of distributed ledger technology?”
“It seems like governments choose winners and losers, not to mention certain forms of regulation efforts to promote the adoption of blockchains,” she continued.
Chairman Paul Atkins said at the Cryptocurrency Task Force Roundtable on Tokenization:
The topic of discussion this afternoon is timely. This is because securities are increasingly moving from traditional (or “off-chain”) databases to blockchain-based (or “on-chain”) ledger systems.
– US Securities and Exchange Commission (@secgov) May 12, 2025
The event was attended by Wall Street Titan representatives such as BlackRock, Nasdaq, Fidelity and Franklin Templeton. All of these show interest in providing securities through blockchain networks. It began with comments from SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. Paul Atkins praised Crypto’s potential to revolutionize traditional financial markets.
“Blockchain technology holds the promise to promote a new kind of market activity that many of the Commission’s legacy rules and regulations still don’t even think about today, and to promote a wide range of new use cases for securities,” he said.
Two key selling points that tokenize traditional securities markets have made these markets more efficient and accessible. In theory, blockchain technology could allow for instantaneous chain settlements in transactions such as stock trading, and usually takes a day to resolve. Such speeds could enable a more accessible market.
But Crenshaw pushed back such assumptions on Monday, claiming that the current delays in Wall Street settlements would provide significant benefits. These include giving you the flexibility to suspend transactions in the case of fraud or national security risks, and reducing the number of transactions that require final settlement by approximately 98%.
“This allows the current system to handle incredible volumes,” she said. “It’s a key reason why our market has been able to withstand record volumes in recent weeks without any major failures.”
Furthermore, it questioned whether blockchain networks could resolve all stock transactions in real time without crashing them.
In her own remarks on Monday, Sec Commissioner Hester Peirce, chief of the agency’s Cryptographic Task Force, welcomed blockchain technology as a tool that has the potential to revolutionize the securities market just like the internet. However, she also acknowledged from the prepared remarks that her Democratic colleagues may have a point about refraining from integrating instant crypto transactions with Wall Street.
“There’s a reason why, as Commissioner Crenshaw discussed, that may not always be what we want,” Perth said. “But I think that’s a possibility that we should think about.”
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