Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author｜jk
On October 2, local time in the United States, “crypto mom” Hester Peirce left the U.S. SEC and officially stepped down as a committee member. Next, she will go to Regent University School of Law to teach. Behind her, the SEC is left with only Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda, both Republicans. The SEC has officially entered the "two-person era."
Looking back on the past eight years, it is not so much a term as a long debate: Peirce started from a minority position and became a lonely supporter of the encryption industry, gradually turning his own ideas into the prototype of today's rules for the encryption industry.
Before 2022: One Man’s Dissent
Peirce was sworn in on January 11, 2018. Previously, she served as senior counsel on the Senate Banking Committee and as a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
Photo of Hester Peirce on SEC official website, source: SEC
On July 26 of that year, the SEC once again rejected the Winklevoss brothers’ Bitcoin ETF application. Peirce immediately issued a statement of dissent, arguing that the relevant rule changes were consistent with the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and should be approved based on precedent. The crypto community remembered this objection and gave her the nickname “Crypto Mom”.
In 2020, she proposed a plan that would give developers three years to build a functional or decentralized network, during which full securities registration requirements would not immediately apply. On April 13, 2021, she released Safe Harbor 2.0, adding requirements for semi-annual disclosure updates and exit reporting. This plan was ultimately not adopted by the committee. But it did not disappear. Corporate lawyers cited it repeatedly as a reference framework for designing token issuance structures.
After 2021, with Gary Gensler as chairman, the SEC did not issue rules for token issuance, DeFi protocols or crypto exchange registrations, but instead moved forward with enforcement actions. Peirce calls this approach “regulation as enforcement,” and similar criticism dates back to 2020.
She reportedly disputed the 2021 DeFi Money Market settlement, arguing that some of the projects being sued were failed experiments rather than fraud. When the SEC sued companies like Coinbase, Kraken, Nexo, and Ripple, she publicly questioned whether it was worthwhile to devote resources to these lawsuits and worried that it would crowd out the agency’s other work and set an inappropriate precedent.
The Defiant’s review article concluded that between 2022 and 2023, she was the only person on the committee who supported encryption and had voting rights, and compliance lawyers could only rely on reading her dissent as a substitute for official guidance.
2024: Late approval
Bitcoin ETFs are another thread running through her tenure. She once criticized in her speech that the SEC refused to communicate constructively with crypto users and developers for four consecutive years and added special thresholds for crypto assets in ETF approval.
In 2024, a Bitcoin spot ETF was finally approved. But her dissent at the time was more focused on the long delays: She believed that the SEC wasted a decade, damaged public trust, consumed staff resources, blurred the role of the agency, and alienated a generation of product innovators from the SEC. Her early dissent is seen by the industry as paving the way for this approval and the SEC’s softening of its stance on meme coins and developer activity in 2025. It's not difficult to understand why many people would like to remember her this way.
Hester Peirce at Bitcoin Conference
In the same year, the White House changed, the upper-level channels for the encryption industry were opened, and the SEC also ushered in a new helmsman.
2025: From minority to leader
On January 21, Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda announced the formation of the Encryption Working Group and appointed Peirce as its head.
The SEC's statement when the task force was formed frankly acknowledged that the SEC, which has previously relied primarily on enforcement to regulate crypto after the fact and reactively, "can do a better job" of providing viable options for those seeking to register.
Hester Peirce’s photos from the conference
The working group then listed ten key areas including the definition of securities attributes and custody solutions, held a public roundtable meeting, revoked the previous bank custody guidelines, and added industry professionals to provide opinions on tokenization and exchange rules. A self-described “liberal maximalist,” she has also said that many meme coins “probably fall outside the SEC’s jurisdiction” and suggested that Congress and the CFTC address the issue.
During her tenure as head of the crypto working group, the SEC’s enforcement stance toward the crypto industry took a marked turn. In February 2025, the SEC first jointly applied with Binance to suspend the lawsuit, and then agreed to withdraw the lawsuit against Coinbase. On February 27, it submitted a withdrawal application with a non-suitability. On March 3, the SEC agreed to drop its lawsuit against Kraken, an outcome Kraken said did not involve an admission of wrongdoing, fines or business adjustments. On May 29, the SEC and Binance jointly applied to withdraw the lawsuit, which also came with the prohibition of further litigation.
In the month to early March, the SEC had dismissed or shelved at least nine cases against crypto companies, Bloomberg reported. Consensys’ case was also dropped, and Robinhood Crypto announced that the SEC had concluded its investigation into it. The withdrawal documents in the Coinbase and Binance cases both cited the ongoing work of the crypto working group as a reason. Although the decision to withdraw the lawsuit was the SEC's overall decision and not Peirce's alone, the settlement of these cases not only had her shadow, but also completely eliminated the "regulation as enforcement" approach that she had criticized for many years.
What she left behind and what is yet to be completed
Years of assertions are now being turned into documents. It is generally believed that her safe harbor thinking can already be seen in the SEC's proposals, exemptions and guidance. But much of this work is still in progress:
Regulation Crypto Assets (token issuance rules): The SEC proposed this proposal on August 18, with a one-time "start-up exemption" of up to $5 million (within four years), and a "financing exemption" of up to $75 million every 12 months, and making crypto assets no longer considered the subject of "investment contracts." The proposal would also preempt state registration and eligibility requirements, with comments closing on October 20. This is the SEC’s first crypto-specific public comment rulemaking and was proposed by Atkins, Peirce and Uyeda in a written vote without objection. Peirce said in the statement that these exemptions and safe harbors will not fit all models and are only one step on the long road to a clear, reasonable and enforceable regulatory framework.
Custody rules: The SEC issued custody proposals on October 1 that would allow investment advisers and regulated funds to hold crypto assets themselves under certain circumstances and use state trust companies as custodians, subject to certain conditions.
Modernizing Transfer Agent Rules: The proposal, introduced on September 1, is the first substantial revision to transfer agent rules in more than 40 years. It allows transfer agents to use a blockchain or other distributed ledger as a master security holder file or as a component thereof, but does not mandate its use. Transfer agents using blockchain or handling tokenized securities are required to maintain wallet addresses in position detail records. However, the proposal does not determine whether a crypto-asset is a security.
Innovation Exemption: On September 17, the SEC issued this temporary, conditional exemption order allowing qualified tokenized securities venues to use automated market makers and liquidity pools to trade tokenized NMS shares. The exemption period is five years, expiring on September 17, 2031, and can be shortened, extended or adjusted by the SEC at any time, and is positioned as a "sandbox" for future rulemaking. The first tranche of stocks (S&P 500 and Russell 1000 constituent stocks, etc.) is limited to 75 targets, and the trading volume does not exceed 0.25% of the daily average volume of the previous month. The second tranche is limited to 250 targets, 2.5%, and is limited to secondary market trading. The SEC is also seeking public comment on the exemption.
Changes in the era of two people
Hester Peirce's second term expired in June 2025 and she was allowed to stay in office for about 18 months, meaning she left about two months ahead of schedule.
The SEC that remains has only two commissioners. Rules adopted in 1995 allow the commission to continue operating with fewer than three commissioners, but with two acting, matters can stall if there is disagreement or recusal. The White House has not yet named a successor, and the successor to the encryption task force has not yet been decided. At the congressional level, the CLARITY Act is still stuck in the Senate, and the industry lacks a legislative framework to comprehensively divide the regulatory powers of the SEC and CFTC. With legislation stalled, Regulation Crypto Assets has temporarily become the main vehicle for providing regulatory clarity in the near future. Some industry executives are worried that future governments may change the rules without legal support.
Conclusion
When Hester Peirce walked into the SEC eight years ago, crypto was still uncharted waters. She only brings an untimely stubbornness: when everyone is on the opposite side of the encryption industry, she still wants to ask what good rules themselves should look like. Thus, a letter of dissent became a pebble, a safe harbor became a sketch, and a long minority position became a signpost that latecomers can refer to again and again.
What “Crypto Mom” left behind in the field of industry regulations is not a completed building, but a drawn drawing, several newly erected scaffolding, and a path that she walked step by step. The road has no name yet, the rules have not yet been fully finalized, and the person to take over has not yet emerged, but the waters of encryption are no longer as quiet as they were eight years ago.