Moving beyond just memecoins is a very exciting future I believe to look forward to.
Yeah. I mean, and without speaking to any particular memecoin or project, I think your point is one that really is important. That's always my message to people. Use this moment to build real things. And it is really incumbent upon us as regulators to build an environment in which that happens and people are rewarded not punished for building real things.
All right, Commissioner Hester Peirce, thanks for coming back on Coinage.
Great to be back, Zack. It's nice to see you again.
Great to see you again. And as always, this might be the last time we ever get to hear you read it. So, this time I actually I'll give you the floor to read your traditional statement.
Yes, my disclaimer. Thank you for reminding me. My views are my own views as a commissioner, not necessarily those of the SEC or my fellow commissioners.
You know, the next time we chat, it's going to be weird to have a conversation with you when you don't have to read that ahead of these.
I think I'm still going to just give it because it's gonna be it's so beaten into me.
It's been ingrained at this point. But no, it's an exciting it's exciting right now because obviously we're chatting on the precipice of the Clarity Act vote, but you guys at the SEC not waiting to get things done since we saw you last. Reg crypto has been put out there. All of the framework and rules not official rule making necessarily, but kind of how you guys are thinking about tokenization and how crypto should be allowed here in America. I want to start with that because it seems like there was a little bit of a hey, should we put this out? Should we wait situation as clarity is happening? What's kind of the thinking right now at the SEC around clarity and what you guys put out?
Well, first of all, I think the hope is that the clarity will get over the finish line. There's been a lot of work that's gone into that legislation and I think it really does cover broad territory. It gives a clear framework as Congress envisions it for market structure for crypto. And so I think we're excited about that moving forward. But we've been saying all along the SEC has authority already to do a lot in the crypto space. And so I think using that authority to start establishing some rules within which people can do fundraising using tokens makes sense. And we think that it's in line with the vision of clarity and we really think time is of the essence to get things moving. And so, we were able to put that out and we're getting comments and we're moving forward.
Yeah, we heard a little bit from the head of President Trump's, I guess policy on digital assets on the White House side, Patrick Witt. We sat down with him in Jackson Hole. Just want to play a little bit of what we heard from him to get your take on the other side when it comes to kind of how, even if clarity doesn't pass, what those rules and options on the table might look like. Here's what Patrick Witt told us.
If ultimately we're not able to get there for one reason or another, the agencies still have tremendous authority and powers available to them. They're kind of teed up. They're locked and loaded, ready to go.
Locked and loaded. Teed up. So I guess you know in the case that it doesn't pass, what would be kind of the bazooka in the toolkit to use the metaphor Commissioner Peirce that maybe you would be looking forward to most finally getting out there?
Well, and Patrick has been working really hard with folks on the Hill to get that legislation done. And so, again, we look forward to that getting done. And I think that really is the ultimate tool for us because it does establish something that is, you know, it gives it a sense of permanence. I think other than that we have been doing what we will continue to do regardless of whether the legislation goes forward which is using the tools we have to talk to people to get their feedback to issue some no action letters to issue guidance to work on exemptions and we did a commission interpretation. We did this Reg Crypto that you mentioned. And we are working on issues around custody for example. So there's no end of things that we can do using our existing authority. We just put out a rule proposal long awaited actually not related solely to crypto but we put out a rule proposal for transfer agents. So there are all these areas of our authority where there may be a crypto piece to it. And we will continue to do that, move forward with those kinds of things.
Yeah, the transfer agents piece, I guess, we can get into in a little bit, but I think obviously the number one thing that has caught the attention of a lot of people recently has been tokenized stocks, those for public shares. We saw the CEO of AMC and the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev, going back and forth at this. I believe he called it violent detestable when it comes to tokenized stock trading. But I just want to get your take on kind of the reaction that you've seen there and particularly I guess you know why that points to why it's so important to kind of finally establish these rules and make the public aware. But what was your reaction? I'm sure you saw that kind of push back around tokenized stocks.
Yeah, I mean I'll stay away from that particular engagement, but just say in general tokenized stock is something that as soon as the commission announced that it was taking a more positive approach to crypto, we started to get incoming inquiries about tokenizing traditional securities, specifically stock. And so we have been working on those issues for a long time, but there's still a lot of questions around how do you tokenize, how do tokenized stocks trade, where do they trade? And so those are things that we are working on. I put out a statement a while ago saying, you know, hey, tokenization is enchanting, but it's not magical. If you tokenize a security, it's still a security. The staff put out a statement kind of walking through the different models for tokenization and really underscoring that you can have issuer tokenization, you can also have third parties doing the tokenization. If a third party is doing the tokenization, you've got to look at what that tokenized security is. Is it the same security? Is it a different security? And so there are a lot of questions around it and for me the main goal is to allow the market to experiment to figure out how it wants to tokenize, whether it wants to tokenize. But also to make sure that people who are buying tokenized securities understand what they're getting. Are they getting the same rights and you know are they getting the dividends and the voting rights that they would get if they were buying the non-tokenized version of the security or are they getting something different and then letting them make the decision as to whether they want to buy that particular security.
I yeah I guess you know not to stick with this exact one case because I know you don't want to necessarily talk about it but because the CEO of AMC invoked you guys in his tweet saying that I wonder how the SEC can possibly support this it is interesting because that in that example as we heard Vlad talking about it the idea of kind of using a stock that's held in custody that doesn't necessarily pass along voting rights but would dividends is kind of an interesting thing to think about it and I'd be curious just broadly to get your take on maybe how the market is digesting some of this stuff because we saw the same thing with the Genius Act and the idea of stable coins kind of creating a digital wrapper having someone hold one for one treasuries exposure to dollars. Kind of the idea of how stable coins have been adopted. I wonder if that loosely kind of fits the early applications that you've seen when it comes to international investors accessing equities that are held. I mean, is the metaphor maybe right to connect the dots between how stable coins have changed things and how you see tokenized stocks maybe changing things?
I mean, somewhat. I think that there is a lot of international interest in getting access to our securities markets and I think tokenization really opens up some new possibilities there and it's exciting to see that. I again I come back to the point that there are a lot of different ways of tokenizing and so it's really hard to paint with one brush. Entitlements are not new. I mean there are entitlements in non-tokenized versions of securities too. But again, what I want is for people to really people who are issuing these things to be very clear about what folks are getting and people who are buying to really think about what they want. A lot of people just want exposure to the stock and they may not care about dividends or voting rights. Other people very much want to hold a security that has all of the rights of the underlying and that's fine, too. There are different models that work for different people.
