SEC Chair Paul Atkins is focusing on supporting innovation in the cryptocurrency sector

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SEC Chair Paul Atkins stated that the agency is committed to fostering innovation in cryptocurrency as it sets new priorities for the industry. Speaking at DC Fintech Week, Atkins emphasized that the commission’s top priority is crypto and tokenization.

He commented, “We want to make sure that we build a strong framework to actually attract people back into the United States who may have fled, but then also be able to build a framework that makes sense for the future, so that innovation can thrive.”

He quipped that the agency might even be called the “Securities and Innovation Commission.”

Atkins still wants to pursue an “innovation exemption”

Since stepping into the role in April, Atkins has diverged sharply from Gary Gensler’s crypto policy, which centered on enforcement actions and the belief that most tokens fell under securities law. He’s become more open to showing support for digital assets. On Wednesday, he said that distributed ledger technology is what excites him most about cryptocurrency.

Atkins had revealed in June that he had asked SEC staff to draft an “innovation exemption” to expedite the rollout of on-chain offerings, stating that he intends to finalize it before the end of the year. Speaking on Wednesday, he mentioned he wanted to roll out new solutions like the “innovation exemption” and eventually create a “super app” linking all crypto-related agencies. He argued that firms shouldn’t have to register separately with each regulator.

Now in its second week, the government shutdown has largely sidelined the SEC. The agency is following an emergency operations plan after Congress failed to pass funding, leaving it with a very limited staff to handle urgent issues. Under its emergency plan, the SEC currently has just a handful of employees on duty to deal with critical situations, the agency said.

The commission’s enforcement actions resulted in billions of dollars in fines for crypto agencies

Under Gary Gensler, the SEC took 125 enforcement actions linked to crypto from 2021 to 2024, resulting in $6.05 billion in penalties. Industry supporters and a few members of Congress complained that the agency’s policy at the time stifled technological development and, based on legal precedents dating back to 1946, was inappropriate for use against crypto.

The Trump administration issued a landmark policy reversal with its January 2025 executive order on digital financial technology. After the change, Acting Chair Mark Uyeda and Chair Paul Atkins dismissed multiple enforcement actions against companies, including Coinbase and Ripple. The SEC also nullified Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, which had, in effect, scared banks away from providing crypto custody. 

Yet the shift has not been controversy-free. Investigators recently found that the SEC’s information technology department had accidentally deleted nearly a year of text messages from Gensler’s phone, adding to questions about record-keeping and transparency under the Biden administration. The deleted messages were reportedly related to discussions regarding crypto enforcement matters, including the Terraform case and a high-profile financial services settlement, which has put the SEC in a bind when fulfilling its FOI obligations.

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