Crypto Still “Wild West”: SEC’s Gensler

Considering the recent Grayscale Investments court victory, Chair Gary Gensler said last week that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is evaluating pending applications for spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds.

Gensler said on CNBC that the SEC “had in the past denied a number of these applications, but the courts here in the District of Columbia weighed in on that. So we’re taking a new look at this based upon those court rulings.”

CNBC reported that Gensler was referring to the Grayscale decision: in August, an appeals court ruled in the company’s favor in its challenge to the SEC’s rejection of its application to convert its Bitcoin trust to an ETF.

The SEC chose not to appeal the judgment, which some cryptocurrency observers took as a sign that a spot Bitcoin ETF was on the horizon.

The SEC has received multiple applications for spot Bitcoin ETFs, including from Fidelity Investments, Franklin Templeton, and BlackRock, but has yet to rule on them.

However, newly opened public comment periods, as well as recent talks with representatives of some of the corporations, have fueled speculation that approval could come shortly.

Still, Gensler repeated his frequently stated opinion of the crypto sphere as one with “a lot of noncompliance” and “far too much fraud and bad actors,” according to CNBC.

Despite the SEC’s scorecard listing “somewhere between 150 and 175 cases either settled or litigated successfully,” Gensler reiterated his depiction of the crypto arena as the “wild west” with a predominance of fraud due to a few rogue individuals.

“This is something that pervades a lot of this field globally,” he told CNBC. “And it’s hard for the good faith actors even to compete because there’s so many challenges elsewhere.”