WASHINGTON: US President-elect Donald Trump’s crypto policy is taking shape with the announcement of a White House crypto czar and a new securities watchdog, but questions remain over who will drive policy and whether too many cooks could slow down changes.
Trump on Thursday appeared to make good on his campaign pledge to be a “crypto president,” announcing he would make former top PayPal executive and crypto evangelist David Sacks “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” A day earlier, Trump said he would nominate pro-crypto Washington attorney Paul Atkins to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.
While crypto executives cheered the news, saying the pair would end the Biden administration’s crypto crackdown and promote innovation, some Washington analysts said the creation of a crypto czar, a new role, sowed ambiguity over who would drive crypto policy and flagged the potential for policy clashes.
“One big question is whether the policy will be driven by Sacks himself. A czar appointed by Trump is going to want to see changes fairly quickly, but the SEC has processes and you can’t just snap your fingers at the SEC and have new rules,” Ian Katz, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, said in an email to Reuters. “Personalities will be important,” he added.
A Silicon Valley venture capitalist and friend of Trump billionaire backer Elon Musk, Sacks was an early Bitcoin investor. In a 2017 CNBC interview, he said cryptocurrencies were revolutionising the internet, but he acknowledged there were also scammers in the sector. He does not appear to have any experience writing or leading policy, according to a Reuters review of his background.
Atkins, meanwhile, is a former SEC official and respected veteran of Washington policy circles who has said he supports crypto innovation as way to boost financial services competition, and has helped crypto companies in their dealings with regulators via his consultancy Patomak Global Partners.
“Atkins is kind of a known quantity,” said Lene Powell, senior legal analyst at financial consultancy Wolters Kluwer. Sacks is from “a different sphere.” Both have called for regulators to be more accommodating of crypto companies, but neither appear to have taken a position on whether and under what circumstances crypto tokens should be considered securities, commodities or utilities – a core issue that will ultimately decide how the industry is regulated.
Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2024
