Crypto firms celebrating the SEC’s softer tone on digital assets should not assume enforcement is over, Commissioner Hester Peirce warned on Monday, saying the agency remains ready to bring cases involving securities violations even as it rewrites the rules governing the sector.
“So just to be clear, it’s not the job of the regulator to help crypto markets always go up,” Peirce told Yellow.com in an interview, pushing back against the idea that Washington’s recent pivot amounts to a hands-off approach. “To the extent there is bad activity that is happening in the securities markets and it involves crypto, we are very much still willing to bring enforcement actions.”
Her remarks outline a regulatory reset that is less about easing oversight and more about redefining the SEC’s jurisdiction, formalizing coordination with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and creating a pathway for tokenized capital markets to operate within existing law.
Enforcement Shift From Registration Violations To Clear Securities Fraud
Peirce tied the rollback of several legacy enforcement actions to what she described as legal ambiguity around whether most crypto assets were securities in the first place.
“It’s not helpful to pursue enforcement actions based on registration claims that are based on a misunderstanding of what the underlying asset is,” she said, adding that the agency is now re-evaluating cases on a facts-and-circumstances basis.
At the same time, she stressed that activity outside the SEC’s statutory remit will not be indirectly policed through enforcement.
“There are activities that are bad that involve crypto that are not within the SEC’s jurisdiction, and we do not have authority from Congress to do anything about that other than to refer it to another regulator,” she said.
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SEC–CFTC Harmonization Aimed At Long-Term Market Structure
A central pillar of the new approach is deeper coordination with the CFTC to eliminate what Peirce described as regulatory “no man’s land” for digital asset products.
“Putting down some markers now and establishing some practices where the two agencies talk and work together regularly, those kind of patterns, if we establish them now, can have a lasting effect,” she said.
The effort is being reinforced by congressional work on market structure legislation, which she said could help “cement” inter-agency cooperation beyond the current administration.
The long-term goal, she indicated, is a durable taxonomy that gives issuers clarity at the product-design stage rather than through enforcement after launch.
Innovation Exemption Designed As Bridge To Tokenized Securities Markets
Peirce also addressed the proposed innovation exemption, framing it as a transitional mechanism for bringing tokenized securities into regulated markets rather than a regulatory sandbox.
“The goal will be to get to a long-term solution which is a regulatory solution with appropriate protections,” she said. “There’s no point in having firms try something without looking toward a longer-term, permanent way for them to do it in a commercially viable way.”
That approach positions the SEC not just as a crypto regulator but as a key architect of on-chain capital markets, with active work underway on how blockchain infrastructure could reshape the role of transfer agents and post-trade processes.
Stablecoins, Custody And The Limits Of SEC Authority
On stablecoins, Peirce reiterated that payment stablecoins fall outside the SEC’s remit under the new legal framework, while yield-bearing instruments will continue to be assessed individually.
“We look at the facts and circumstances of each asset,” she said, declining to apply a blanket classification.
She also defended the reversal of SAB 121, which had made it commercially difficult for banks to custody digital assets, arguing that systemic risk oversight belongs with prudential regulators and the Financial Stability Oversight Council rather than the SEC.
“The crypto asset markets are quite small,” she said. “Risk management is something that financial institutions spend a lot of time thinking about.”
At the same time, she emphasized the importance of preserving self-custody as a policy principle, calling it something that “the law should protect.”
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