Commissioner Peirce is thinking big. She wants not only to devise a tailored scheme for crypto regulation, but then to use the thinking on that new scheme to rethink how our existing securities regulations might be revised.  

With a letter that runs 34 pages and contains 196 footnotes, Senator Warren demonstrates that within her still beats the heart of an academic. Notwithstanding the number of footnotes, the principal criticisms that she makes, as listed above, don't seem likely to win too many moot court arguments. Here is the flaw in each:

1. The Consolidated Supervised Entity regime did not cause the collapse of the registered broker-dealers. It was largely intended to give…

Commissioner Crenshaw's remarks suggest that because activities involving crypto create risks (most obviously fraud), the SEC should regulate crypto. While understandable, this logic is troubling. A regulator should not be stretching the bounds of the authority granted it by statute in order to address what the regulator perceives to be a problem or to achieve a desired policy result.  

By claiming that essentially all crypto assets were securities, without attempting any serious…

There is no area of financial regulation that is so in need of reduced regulation as that governing of the production of investment research. Investment research, which is a necessity for strong capital markets, has been treated by the SEC and FINRA as an inherently suspect activity. As a result, they have imposed onerous regulations that both made it more expensive to produce and to provide less of a benefit (profit motive) for it to be produced.