Paul Atkins, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, pledged on Wednesday that regulations under his leadership would benefit the crypto sector and prevent politics from “stifling” capital formation, according to prepared testimony made public by the Senate.
“A top priority of my chairmanship will be to work with my fellow Commissioners and Congress to provide a firm regulatory foundation for digital assets through a rational, coherent, and principled approach,” Atkins said in written remarks.
Paul Atkins, President Donald Trump’s nominee for chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, holds as much as $1 million in equity in two crypto companies, and up to $5 million in a crypto investment fund, according to an ethics disclosure released Tuesday. These holdings, along with Atkins’ pro-crypto policy stances, stand in marked contrast to his predecessor, Gary Gensler, who was a strident critic of the industry.
The ethics filing shows that, up until February, he held a board seat on Securitize, the BlackRock-backed tokenization firm, and owned between $250,000 and $500,000 in call options in the company. Atkins also held between $250,000 and $500,000 in equity in Anchorage Digital, the crypto custodian valued at over $3 billion as of its last funding round. His other crypto holdings come in the form of a stake, worth between $1 and $5 million, in the investment firm Off the Chain Capital, where Atkins is a limited partner.
The three companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment or whether Atkins has already sold his holdings. In his ethics agreement, he agreed to divest his assets shortly after his confirmation. His confirmation hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
High-level nominees and cabinet members are required to submit ethics agreements and asset disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics. These disclosures only require nominees to specify estimates of their holdings. Atkins and his spouse have a combined net worth of at least $327 million, Bloomberg reported.
The incoming SEC chair’s crypto holdings amount to a small portion of his total wealth, which he earned primarily from a business consulting firm he founded.
His pending appointment comes after the crypto exchange FTX went bankrupt in November 2022, which prompted the Gensler-led SEC to crack down on crypto companies. The former SEC chair argued that the vast majority of cryptocurrencies were securities, or financial assets like stocks and bonds that fall under the purview of the regulator. Because most crypto firms didn’t register with the SEC, they were in violation of securities law, he and his agency claimed.
In 2023, the regulator sued the exchanges Gemini, Binance, and Coinbase, for listing cryptocurrencies, like Solana and Cardano, that it alleged were unregistered securities. The SEC also targeted celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan for promoting tokens, among other individuals. The crypto industry fought back and argued that decades-old securities law did not apply to new technology. Executives like Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, argued that the government should draft legislation to account for blockchains, rather than crack down on the crypto sector.
