SEC Chair Torches Crypto Businesses' Narrative, Says 'The Rules Have Already Been Published'

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler, burned the narrative of multiple crypto businesses over unclear and lacking crypto regulations when he said that "the rules have already been published" and asserted that the businesses under the nascent industry have been mainly defiant of established rules and guidelines.

"To make it quite direct: this is a field that has been operating largely non-compliant. [...] There's nothing about a new technology that makes it non-consistent with the public policies that Congress has laid out," Gesler said in a Monday keynote speech at the Financial Markets Conference when asked about the agency's dispute with major centralized crypto exchange Coinbase and asserted that "the rules have already been published."

The SEC chairman, who previously led the Biden–Harris transition's Federal Reserve, Banking, and Securities Regulators agency review team, also argued that the regulator has already set the rules required for crypto exchanges, custody assets, broker, dealer, or advisor to register their services and offerings with the government agency.

During his speech at the conference, Gensler mentioned Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the impact of their innovation.

He also assured that the SEC is not at all behind the times and crowed about the 140 cases the financial watchdog has charged over the years.

Gensler, who was given only until Friday by the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services to respond to its request for a list of all crypto entities that have tried to register with the commission along with the corresponding documents and communications, also reminded the public of how cryptocurrency entities build deceitful and illegal business models.

"It's a false narrative that they are decentralized," the SEC chair said, adding that "they tend towards centralization, and you can find a website and a team of entrepreneurs around most of these."

Gensler further said, "Their business models tend to be built on taking customer funds and commingling them."

The SEC and Gensler have been under heavy fire over the past months because of the agency's ongoing crackdown in the crypto industry.

With several cryptocurrency executives, particularly Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, urging Congress to intervene, the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services recently burned the SEC chair and the entire agency for failing to provide responses to inquiries from crypto entities.

"It is inconceivable to us that a nearly 5,000-person agency with nearly 150 attorneys in its General Counsel's office and more than 200 employees in the IT department is struggling to process three requests from Congress in a timely and responsive manner," the Committee said in a letter.