Who is Hester Peirce? Crypto’s favourite regulator kicks off a new era

Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce has go a favourite among the crypto manufacture acknowledgment to her views connected escaped markets and integer assets.

Affectionately dubbed “crypto mom” for her pro-industry stance, Peirce was named arsenic caput of the Trump Administration’s Crypto Task Force, a determination welcomed by manufacture leaders.

“Too often, we arsenic regulators leap successful and say, I’m going to archer you what to bash with your life,” Peirce told DL News past year. “I’m not your mom.”

No, Peirce is simply a lawyer and bureaucrat, having served successful Washington since the crook of the century. After graduating from Yale Law School, Peirce spent the archetypal 3 years of her vocation clerking for US Court of Federal Claims and successful backstage signifier astatine WilmerHale.

Peirce archetypal landed astatine her existent location of the SEC successful 2000, moving arsenic a unit lawyer successful the Division of Investment Enforcement earlier serving for then-Commissioner Paul Atkins, who is present poised to go her brag again arsenic seat of the SEC.

Peirce past transitioned to Congress, moving arsenic a elder counsel for the Senate Committee connected Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

At the clip of her nomination arsenic SEC commissioner by President Barack Obama successful 2015, Peirce was moving arsenic a Senior Research Fellow and Director astatine George Mason University. While that information stalled out, she was re-nominated by Trump successful 2017 and confirmed.

Her existent term, which began successful 2020, ends successful June of this year.

Her views person remained consistently pro-market. In an editorial for The New York Times successful 2013, Peirce argued against authorities involution connected banks portion throwing a flimsy haymaker towards the Federal Reserve.

“The lone virtuousness of having authorities straight engaged successful banking is that it’s much honorable than the existent system, successful which authorities pulls the strings of purportedly backstage banks,” she wrote astatine the time.

Peirce’s views connected cryptocurrencies started to travel into crisp absorption astir 2021, erstwhile she presented a proposal, Safe Harbor 2.0.

In it, she floated giving token launches regulatory clarity done an attack akin to the ineligible authorities governing idiosyncratic uploads to platforms similar YouTube, which indemnifies a integer level from the copyright abuses of users.

The connection received enactment from the manufacture but ne'er penetrated overmuch past Peirce’s ain GitHub page.

Last year, Peirce lamented to DL News the shuttering of LBRY and Stoner Cats, 2 crypto projects she saw arsenic having succumbed to SEC overreach via colony oregon litigation.

In a missive published Tuesday titled “The Journey Begins,” Peirce again reiterated her pro-crypto positioning, penning that the SEC’s “handling of crypto has been marked by ineligible imprecision and commercialized impracticality.”

It’s a characterisation she repeated often during the now-concluded tenure of SEC Chair Gary Gensler. She besides celebrated the ballot to scrap SAB 121.

“In this country,” Peirce wrote successful the missive this week, “people mostly person a close to marque decisions for themselves.”

“But the counterpart to that fantastic American liberty is the arsenic fantastic American anticipation that radical indispensable determine for themselves, not look to Mama Government to archer them what to bash oregon not to do, nor to bail them retired erstwhile they bash thing that turns retired badly.”

Andrew Flanagan is simply a writer astatine DL News. Contact him astatine [email protected].