- Then-professor at MIT Gary Gensler said that “three-quarters of the market aren’t securities.”
- Gensler also specified what he thinks cryptocurrencies like ETH are.
- Gensler has since changed his opinion about ETH and believes it’s a security, though sometimes he refuses to call it one.
The crypto industry faces increasing pressure from regulators worldwide, especially in the United States. However, there’s still a lot of confusion related to virtually all parts of the technology.
One of the most important – and confusing – questions is whether cryptocurrencies like ETH are securities. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler seems to believe that ETH is a security, even though a video from 2018 shows him saying that virtually all tokens are not securities.
Gary Gensler’s Wavering Opinions
A video clip from 2018 showing Gary Gensler talking about cryptocurrencies is circulating on Twitter.
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In the video, the then-professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Gensler says in a graduate course called “Blockchain and Money” that “three-quarters of the market are not ICOs or not what would be called securities.”
Gensler then continues, saying that cryptocurrencies are just a “commodity, a cash crypto.”
“Even in the US, Canada, and Taiwan, the three jurisdictions that follow something similar to the Howey Test that we've talked about. Three-quarters of the market is non-securities. It's just a commodity, a cash crypto.”
Gensler’s comments directly contradict his current stance. The SEC Chair has said multiple times that he believes that only Bitcoin (BTC) is a commodity and that the rest of the cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum’s ETH, are securities that must be registered with the agency.
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However, in recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, Gensler failed to provide a clear answer when asked whether ETH is a security.
At the same time, Gensler repeated time and again that crypto rules are “clear” and that crypto projects just come and register with the SEC.
On the Flipside
- It remains unclear what the SEC or Gary Gensler thinks of ETH and other tokens in the market.
Why You Should Care
Whether crypto tokens are securities or not has a huge impact on the market and its participants.
Read more about Gary Gensler’s stance on Algorand:
SEC Chair Gary Gensler Calls Algorand ‘Security’ Despite Praising It Earlier
Read more about a hack on zkSync Era:
