When Gary Gensler took over the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this year, many in the cryptocurrency community touted it as the start of a new era. Gensler was thought to bring clarity and prosperity to the emerging industry. However, it was not expected. Genser was just as stern, if not more so than the previous president. And now, as a new report reveals, Gensler’s particularly XRPHis hostility to crypto started years ago and may have influenced the SEC’s stance on cryptocurrency even before he took over the leadership.
The New York Post’s report revealed that Gensler met with former SEC chair Jay Clayton in 2018. At the time, Gensler was just starting out as a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
According to Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino, who disclosed the 2018 meeting, the two leaders are at the meeting. cryptocurrency talked about how much they can organize their units.
Citing sources familiar with the meeting, the report claims that Clayton and Gensler focused on how digital currencies are largely unregulated and a haven for fraud. Both agreed that most coins are securities under SEC supervision.
Loving Bitcoin and opposing Ethereum and XRP
Gensler has always been a big fan of Bitcoin, a fact he conveyed during the meeting. According to him, it was the only “true crypto”. It’s a belief he’s had since he was president of the CFTC, before joining MIT and the SEC. Gensler didn’t like Ethereum back then, which wasn’t as great as it is today. According to sources, he did not like XRP even more. He claimed that both were securities that took advantage of regulatory uncertainty to evade securities regulations. Gensler has never hesitated to admit that he believes Ethereum and XRP are securities, not currencies. In 2018, he gave an interview to the New York Times where he claimed:
“There is a strong case for both – but especially Ripple – that they are non-compliant securities.”
According to those close to the economist, the biggest problem with XRP and Ethereum is that Ripple and the Ethereum Foundation sell the coins and use the proceeds to build their platform. This makes them illegal securities.
Three months after the Clayton-Gensler meeting, Bill Hinman gave his famous 2018 speech. Hinman, the director of corporate finance at the SEC, claimed that BTC and ETH are not securities. This conversation became the subject of the ongoing Ripple and SEC lawsuit. Hinman claimed these were personal opinions. However, according to the report, Clayton studied Hinman’s speech before the presentation and “had some backlash”.
If that incident isn’t suspicious enough on its own, both names have had interesting career developments after leaving the SEC. Clayton currently works with an organization that manages billions of dollars worth of BTC. The firm known as One River Asset Management has even applied for a Bitcoin ETF, which, ironically, was repeatedly turned down by Clayton while he was head of the SEC.
Hinman is an advisor to Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett, a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which aims to advance the growth of the Ethereum blockchain.
About a year ago, there were three top cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP. Other altcoinWhile the ‘s rose quite noticeably, these were the three to watch. The SEC’s lawsuit against XRP eliminated this trio, bringing devastating losses to XRP and has yet to fully recover since. XRP is the only cryptocurrency in the top 10 that failed to hit an all-time high during this year’s bull run.