Senate Confirms Crypto-Friendly Paul Atkins as Gensler’s SEC Successor

Paul Atkins, President Trump’s choose to steer the SEC, was formally confirmed by a full Senate vote Wednesday night, with lawmakers largely voting alongside social gathering strains. 

52 Republicans voted to verify Atkins, a pro-crypto SEC veteran who has made reforming the company’s digital belongings coverage a prime precedence. 44 Democrats opposed the nomination.

Atkins will succeed former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who, beneath the Biden administration, attracted the ire of crypto leaders by suing or investigating nearly every main firm within the trade for alleged violations of securities legal guidelines.

The incoming SEC chair is all however sure to have a far totally different strategy to crypto.

Atkins, who beforehand served as an SEC commissioner beneath President George W. Bush, lately told senators {that a} prime concern of his chairmanship can be offering “a agency regulatory basis for digital belongings by means of a rational, coherent, and principled strategy.”

Atkins himself holds as much as a $5 million stake in a crypto funding agency the place he serves as a restricted accomplice.

Till February, he held between $250,000 and $500,000 in fairness within the crypto custodian Anchorage Digital, and the identical quantity in name choices in Securitize, a BlackRock-backed blockchain agency the place he additionally held a board seat, in line with ethics disclosures.

SEC pushes ahead on crypto

In Atkins’ absence, the SEC has barrelled forward with pro-crypto insurance policies. The company’s two Republican commissioners—Appearing Chair Mark Uyeda and Commissioner Hester Peirce—have moved to dismiss nearly each main lawsuit in opposition to a crypto firm.

They’ve additionally issued statements successfully exempting meme coins, crypto mining, and stablecoins from securities regulation.

The SEC is presently working with simply three commissioners—Uyeda, Peirce, and Democratic commissioner Caroline Crenshaw—versus the total 5.

Crenshaw supported former chair Gensler’s crypto lawsuits through the Biden administration, and her nomination to the SEC was so intensely protested by the trade in December that Senate Democrats abandoned a push to renominate her. 

The SEC’s rules state that not more than three commissioners from the identical political social gathering can serve on the identical time to “be sure that the Fee stays non-partisan.”

Thus, Trump would ordinarily appoint two Democrats to fill empty seats on the company. 

However the president has lately proven an unorthodox resistance to such long-held Washington norms.

Final month, he fired two Democrats serving on the Federal Commerce Fee and a Democrat on the Nationwide Labor Relations Board.

Till now, a key Thirties Supreme Courtroom ruling has protected commissioners on such impartial businesses—the SEC included—from being fired with out trigger.

Consultants imagine Trump may very well be angling to have that long-standing precedent overturned by the Supreme Courtroom’s present conservative majority. Lawsuits on the topic have already been filed.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair