By Roslyn Layton. September 12, 2021. (Forbes).
For five years, investors and project developers in the $2 trillion blockchain innovation space have been subjected to an increasingly maddening charade that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has called “regulatory clarity.” Years of SEC speeches, public statements, meeting records, correspondence and first-hand accounts from market participants provide anything but clarity for the rules on digital assets or distributed ledger technology (DLT) projects. This is another financial crisis in the making.
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said at an Aspen Institute appearance this summer that the rules are “awfully clear” on crypto. In a recent interview with Financial Times, he urged developers to “talk to us, come in” because the fate of the industry, like all finance, “is about trust.” Few can see this “clarity,” but its absence is so acute that even the biggest U.S. companies in the blockchain industry can no longer count on the SEC to provide any clear guidance other than through a lawsuit.