In a closely contested Senate vote (52-44), Paul Atkins was announced as the US SEC Chairman, signaling a potential shift toward a more crypto-friendly regulatory approach.
On April 9, the US Senate finally announced Paul Atkins as the permanent Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a 52-44 vote largely along party lines. This close voting among the Senate members suggests that Atkins’s selection remains a matter of contestation for many.
The crypto community has been cheering Paul Atkins’s appointment, hoping for better regulatory reforms in the industry after four years of crackdown by former chair Gary Gensler. Atkins has been closely watching the developments in the crypto industry and has a $5 million stake in a crypto investment firm, where he serves as a limited partner.
As of February 2025, he held equity valued between $250,000 and $500,000 in the crypto custodian Anchorage Digital, along with a similar amount in call options for Securitize, a blockchain firm backed by BlackRock.
Paul Atkins to Continue with US SEC’s Crypto-Friendly Approach
Atkins previously served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008, a tenure that spanned the global financial crisis. However, in one of his recent speeches, Atkins told Senators that one of the top areas of attention during his chairmanship would be providing “a firm regulatory foundation for digital assets through a rational, coherent, and principled approach.”
Over the last few months, SEC’s acting chair Marky Uyeda took several bold and crypto-friendly measures while working along with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. Positive developments in lawsuits against Ripple, Coinbase, and Binance will provide greater freedom for these big crypto giants to function with ease.
Atkins is most likely to continue with this crypto-friendly approach moving ahead. Expressing confidence in Paul Atkins’s leadership, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott said:
“Chairman Atkins will also provide regulatory clarity for digital assets, allowing American innovation to flourish, and ensuring we remain competitive on the global stage.”
The Other Side of Atkins and Why He Could Be Bad to Markets
Following Paul Atkins’s appointment as the US SEC Chair, Dennis M. Kelleher, co-founder of Better Markets, noted that Atkins was the reason behind the capital markets crash during the 2008 financial crisis.
“Atkins can be expected to take orders from the White House, politicize the SEC, mindlessly cut key staff, deregulate the industry, gut the enforcement professionals, side with management over investors, and generally undermine the mission and mandate of the SEC,” Kelleher stated.
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