- 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.
Sponsored
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.
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: