US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, known for advocating a lighter touch in regulatory approach towards crypto, has said during a public talk that she thinks it ideal if crypto markets could self-regulate.  

In a discussion at MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Bitcoin Expo 2019 on March 9, she made such comments while speaking with former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Gary Gensler.

Gensler had said that a strong and singular nationwide regulatory framework will be preferable. Such a framework should cover not only trading platforms that offer security tokens or complex investment instruments, but also the ones listing commodities such as Bitcoin (BTC). His purpose for wider coverage is to enhance investor protection, prevention of money laundering, and better address regulatory gaps across various states.

In response to Gensler, Peirce, also known as “Crypto Mom” in the crypto community, said:

“One really important thing to remember is that people regulate each other in their interactions with one another, and that’s the whole purpose of the Bitcoin idea, that it would be a community that would be able to regulate itself. As problems arise, people in that community are thinking about how to deal with those problems. One model would be to have a government regulator, but I don’t think that’s the only model.”

Acknowledging the status quo which currently includes stipulations such as SEC registration requirements and compliance with money transmission laws, she nonetheless reaffirmed her stance. She said, “That’s the regulatory model we’ve chosen. I think, again, these markets could regulate themselves if we lived in a world where we allowed that.”

Last month, TheCryptoSight reported Peirce as saying during another public forum at an academic institution that in some ways crypto owes its very progress to existing regulatory delays.

“We owe it to investors to be careful, but we also owe it to them not to define their investment universe with our preferences,” she stated then.