Hester Peirce names 15 SEC crypto task force members who will set new course for the agency

United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Hester Peirce has announced the complete makeup of the recently formed SEC Crypto Task Force.

The task force was announced by SEC acting chairman Mark Uyeda on Jan. 21. The task force has several aims, according to an accompanying description. They include “appropriately distinguish securities from non-securities, … provide realistic paths to registration for both crypto assets and market intermediaries … and make sure that enforcement resources are deployed judiciously.”

The task force has familiar faces, and a few new ones

Peirce, a vocal crypto advocate in Gary Gensler’s SEC, was named head of the task force on Jan. 21. In addition, Richard Gabbert was named the group’s chief of staff and Taylor Asher was named chief policy adviser. Gabbert and Asher are also senior advisers to Uyeda.

There are 15 members of the task force. “The task force is composed of staff from the Acting Chairman’s office and other divisions and offices across the Commission,” Peirce said in the SEC announcement of the appointments.

Some of the appointees are longtime SEC staffers. According to LinkedIn, Gabbert, for example, has been at the agency since 2011 and served as Peirce’s counsel for seven years. Others were hired for the task force position. Chief Counsel Michael Selig is joining from law firm Wilkie Farr & Gallagher.

Asher was an aide to pro-crypto Senator Bill Hagerty for a year before joining the SEC as an adviser to Uyeda in 2023.

The task force has veteran crypto defenders

Senior adviser Landon Zinda came to the task force from advocacy group Coin Center, where he had been policy counsel. In October 2022, Coin Center and three individuals filed suit against the Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) seeking the removal of OFAC sanctions on Tornado Cash and 44 wallets associated with it.

The Tornado Cash suit was launched before Zinda joined the organization. During Zinda’s tenure, Coin Center has provided support for the Jarretts’ latest suit against the Internal Revenue Service and for Lewellen v. Garland, in which a software developer sued the Justice Department for targeting developers who create non-custodial crypto wallets for unlicensed money transmission.

Before Coin Center, Zinda was counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking focusing on crypto and fintech. Zinda began his career at the Heritage Foundation.

Senior adviser Chris Rice is also senior adviser in the SEC Division of Investment Management. He came to the agency in 2023 after working in alternative investments in major financial institutions.

New policies precede the task force

Mark Uyeda has been on the SEC staff since 2006 and has been a commissioner since 2022. U.S. President Donald Trump has nominated Paul Atkin to be the chair of the SEC. He has not been confirmed by the Senate yet. 

Atkins comes from a legal background. He was a commissioner at the SEC from 2002 to 2008 under three chairs. He has been on the staff of two SEC commissioners and was also co-chair of the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Token Alliance. No date has been set for Atkin’s confirmation hearing.

Even without the new chair in place, the SEC has shown indications of a drastic policy change from Gensler’s strident anti-crypto stance. Since Jan. 20, when Uyeda was appointed acting chair, the agency has dropped actions against the Tron Foundation, cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken, decentralized exchange Uniswap, NFT platform Yuga Labs, MetaMask developer Consensus and financial services company Robinhood.

The agency has also rescinded the burdensome accounting rule in Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 that required crypto platforms to treat all assets they custodied as liabilities.

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