- Gary Gensler accused of hypocrisy as old footage surfaces.
- The SEC has gotten more rigid in the crypto space since the collapse of FTX.
Given the recent harsh regulatory environment, there has been old video footage of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Gensler circulating, and the views in the footage point towards an era with a more lenient Gensler towards specific cryptocurrencies, with the inclusion of Ether.
The newly surfaced video featuring Gary Gensler from 2018 is now making rounds on social media showing that the now-chairperson of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission stated that multiple cryptocurrencies were not viewed as securities.
The video began circulating on June 12 from multiple Twitter accounts, and it is believed that the video came from a 2018 event that Bloomberg had held for institutional investors. In the video, Gary Gensler was heard to have said, “Over 70% of the crypto market is Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ether. Why did I name those four? They are not securities.”
When the video was made, Gary was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the footage predated his appointment as a chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020.
However, in contrast to how Gensler was presented in the old footage now circulating, his most recent actions at the Securities and Exchange Commission have been a different story and have seen the regulator initiate a flurry of enforcement actions on the crypto space in the past few months. All of this took a turn for the worse after the collapse of FTX.
In his appointment as a chair for the SEC, he has suggested that all cryptocurrencies, except for Bitcoin, are securities. The SEC now labels at most minuscule 68 cryptocurrencies as securities in various lawsuits. However, none of the four cryptocurrencies Gensler mentioned in the videos now circulating have made it on the list.
The comments in the old video are such a sharp contrast to Gensler’s recent views on Ether, and even after being pressed for his response on if ETH was indeed security before the U.S. House Committee in April, he didn’t deign to answer.
Other videos of Gensler that were taken around his time as a professor at MIT also surfaced this year, with him making similar comments about cryptocurrencies. In a 2019 video that came out in April, Gensler called Algorand “great technology.” The same week the video surfaced, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex with a claim that ALGO was security in their complaint and had many people in the crypto space calling Gensler a hypocrite.
Conclusion
While the footage circulating before Gensler was appointed as a chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission has made people in the crypto industry claim his actions are hypocritical. A U.S. lawmaker has introduced a bill to fire Gensler, with claims of him abusing his power.
