Former SEC Chair Jay Clayton Says Success of Crypto Driving Step Change in Regulatory Policies

Jay Clayton, the former Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), says successful crypto adoption is forcing regulators to draw up policies in support of the technology.

In a new interview on CNBC television, Clayton argues that regulators are having to come to terms with the fact that digital assets like stablecoins are here to stay for the great benefits they provide.

“One of the fascinating things about crypto is that it came not through the institutional markets, where most of the financial product development takes place. Most of the financial product development in the globe takes place in the US, in our institutional markets. Crypto, digital assets, really came globally and at the retail level. So the development was something very new for, I would say, regulators across the globe in the way that it came about. And there have been a lot of old lessons relearned and new lessons learned.

One of the old lessons relearned and learned in a tough way was that when you raise money from the general public in America, that’s an incredibly rigorously regulated transaction. We protect the public from securities offerings in an incredibly rigorous way…

On the other side, what I think regulators have had to learn is that this technology could be and it in many ways has become a step change for existing processes and some new processes, including what I would say is the rise of stablecoin, which is one of the more remarkable developments in finance in the last decade.”

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