SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said on Wednesday that the agency should draw clear but flexible legal boundaries for crypto, focusing on regulated conduct rather than the blockchain infrastructure itself.
Speaking in a personal capacity at the IC3 Blockchain Camp at Princeton University, Peirce laid out a set of principles she said should guide the SEC’s approach.
Overly prescriptive rules, she argued, force developers and firms to spend time and money managing legal uncertainty and fail to accommodate technological change.
“The SEC is not a general-purpose infrastructure regulator,” Peirce said.
Her central distinction separated neutral infrastructure from centralized actors that control user assets. Open-source code publication, general-purpose blockchain processing, and transparent non-custodial tools should fall outside the SEC’s reach, she said.
Centralized actors with discretion over or custody of other people’s securities and funds remain “fair game” for securities regulation.
Peirce also said she and Chairman Paul Atkins have called on the Commission to revisit key definitions, including “exchange” and “broker,” to capture activity that warrants regulation while carving out activity that does not.
The SEC’s Crypto Task Force issued a staff statement in April on broker-dealer registration for certain crypto user interfaces as an interim measure while the agency considers broader action.
