Former SEC chairman Jay Clayton says that while BTC is not yet considered to be a security under the law, it does not mean that it should not be regulated. The former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States, Jay Clayton, has stated that BTC and other crypto assets are definitely going to be more heavily regulated in the near future.
Jay Clayton on Bitcoin and Digital Assets
The former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also said in an interview during the show Squawk Box by CNBC that he is expecting the BTC and other crypto assets to be heavily regulated, both directly and indirectly. He speculates that the future of digital assets will definitely be dependent on the regulations imposed on them by both the domestic authorities and the international platforms.
Jay Clayton has recently joined the Investment firm One River as a crypto asset advisor in the Asset Management department. He said that even though BTC was not considered to be a security even before the time, he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but it does not mean that it should not be regulated accordingly.
The most notable thing is that the statement of the former chairman of the SEC, Jay Clayton, came during the recent legal tussle between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple Labs, the parent company of a crypto token named XRP. The SEC regulator sued the company for a hefty price of $1.3 billion during December 2020, right before the time when Jay Clayton left SEC, saying that Ripple Labs and its two executives, Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse, have allegedly earned hundreds of millions of US Dollars while illegally selling the XRP token since the year 2013.
The main argument of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was based on the fact that while the XRP token has many features of a security, it still is not registered as a security, and hence, it is illegal to trade or exchange the crypto asset publicly. During the tenure of Jay Clayton, SEC also confirmed that BTC and ETH are not considered securities.