The newly formed SEC Crypto Task Force, led by Commissioner Hester Peirce, is moving forward. Its first roundtable is scheduled, and senior staff has been announced.
The developments at the task force come during a whirlwind week for both the commission and crypto regulation, including President Donald Trump’s social media announcement on a plan for the government to create a “Crypto Strategic Reserve” to hold certain digital assets.
Bloomberg also reported this week that SEC employees were offered a $50,000 buyout to resign or retire.
The task force’s first roundtable in its “Spring Sprint Toward Crypto Clarity” will be on March 21. It will be entitled “How We Got Here and How We Get Out—Defining Security Status.” It will be open to the public at the SEC’s headquarters and streamed live.
Peirce said the task force was looking forward to hearing from the public when “developing a workable regulatory framework for crypto.” Acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda formed the task force shortly after Trump’s inauguration and installed Peirce as its head.
In an unattributed press release announcing the task force, the SEC described former Chair Gary Gensler’s crypto approach as creating “an environment hostile to innovation and conducive to fraud” and relying on enforcement actions to regulate crypto “retroactively and reactively.”
In a subsequent statement, Peirce offered a list of questions and split the crypto asset space into four distinct categories, including assets that are securities because “they have the intrinsic characteristics” of securities, those assets that are offered and sold as part of investment contracts (even if the assets themselves are not securities), tokenized securities and “all other crypto assets,” which Peirce said, in her view, were not securities.
Peirce also announced the task force’s members on Monday, saying it was filled with staff from Uyeda’s office and other divisions and offices in the commission. The 12 new members joined the already-announced Richard Gabbert and Taylor Asher as chief of staff and chief policy advisor, respectively (both from Uyeda’s office).
They include Chief Counsel Michael Selig, a partner at the law firm Wilkie Farr & Gallagher and a member of its crypto practice. According to CoinDesk, Selig worked under former Commodity Future Trading Commission Chairman Chris Giancarlo (nicknamed “CryptoDad” by crypto advocates) at the law firm. He criticized Gensler’s alleged crypto policy of “regulation by enforcement.”
Landon Zinda is also joining the task force from outside the commission. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was previously policy counsel with the crypto think tank Coin Center and served as counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and the House Financial Services Committee, focusing on crypto. Before that, he worked for six years at The Heritage Foundation.
Additionally, the commission is offering “eligible employees” a $50,000 buyout to leave the agency by April 4, according to an email sent last week by COO Ken Johnson to all staff (and reported by Bloomberg).
To qualify, employees must have been on the payroll before Jan. 24, must leave through resignation, transfer to another agency or retire, and if they leave and return to the SEC in five years, they must pay back the incentive in full.
The buyout offers come shortly after reports that members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team were planning to enter the SEC and Crain’s Business Chicago reported that the General Services Administration was considering closing SEC regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.
This weekend, Trump announced that his administration’s “Crypto Reserve” would include XRP, Solana and Cardano (three lesser-known cryptocurrencies, according to the Associated Press). He later followed up by saying they’d also include Bitcoin and Ethereum. Crypto values initially soared after the Sunday announcement, but by Monday afternoon, they had dropped below their prices before the postings.