Hester Peirce, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner, said that the lessons that the regulator has learnt during the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETF process will stick with it.
Peirce said in an interview that a court had informed the SEC that it was taking the wrong approach because it was not showing the consistency that is expected of a regulator.
She stated that upon receiving the analysis from the court, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, had reacted accordingly.
The statement
When questioned about the status of applications that have been filed for a spot Ethereum ETF with the SEC, Peirce refused to discuss them.
However, she expressed hope that future applications of crypto ETFs would not have to deal with a long process of court cases and appeals.
The commissioner said that it was not how they intended to do their approvals and added that the same consideration should be applied to these products as the one used for similar ones.
She went on to say that the court should not have to tell the regulator that it is taking an arbitrary approach for it to get things done the right way.
The elaboration
Peirce also added that she could not predict how things would turn out for an exchange-traded product, but also said that the circumstances and facts are certainly important.
She also asserted that it takes a considerable amount of work and time to prepare an ETF for the market, which includes ensuring that all disclosures are in accordance with how the product works.
The approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs by the SEC had been thrown into confusion when the Twitter account of the agency had been compromised.
A fake tweet claimed that all spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved, which was published a day before the actual approvals were given.
The crypto markets suffered from significant upheaval due to the fake tweet and then its retraction, as the price of Bitcoin declined.
The criticism
Peirce also criticized the ‘problematic’ handling of the regulator of the ETF approval process and for generating so much anticipation around the deadline of a regulatory decision.
Talking about the authorized tweet, she said that they would not have gotten to a place where someone would want to do something like that, or it would be worth someone’s time to do something like it if they had not drawn so much attention towards the approvals.
She also reiterated her earlier remarks after the approval of the spot Bitcoin ETFs when she had criticized the agency for abusing administrative procedures.
This applies to investments that the regulator does not approve of. She said that in a hyper-regulated world, they often forget about the other side of regulation.
She said that when regulation is aimed at protecting someone, it often involves taking away choices from the people.
She added that American people should be able to decide if they want to add a certain product to their portfolio or not.