The Biden administration's lawsuits and regulatory actions against Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are likely to be withdrawn under President-elect Donald Trump's administration, as he had made it a campaign priority to make American a global leader in digital currencies.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler is running out of time to push his lawsuits against cryptocurrencies like the exchanges of Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"To the extent there are no fraud claims involved, my sense is the commission would be likely to dismiss those cases in the future," former SEC general counsel Robert Stebbins told the paper.
Stebbins added the SEC should pause its crypto lawsuits and clear a path for the industry in America with litigation costs in time and resources.
Those words make Stebbins in line with Trump's campaign vows, if not a potential heir to be SEC chair.
Other potential SEC chair candidates include former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins and ex-Coinbase chief legal officer Brian Brooks, according to the report.
Trump has long vowed less governmental control from organizations like the SEC and the Federal Reserve as a way to free up American business, enterprise, and innovation.
Trump has specifically made bitcoin and cryptocurrencies a priority for making America great in that marketplace around the world.
"I want the United States to be first in technology, first in science, first in manufacturing, first in artificial intelligence, and first in space," Trump told a July Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
"This afternoon, I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet, and the bitcoin superpower of the world, and we'll get it done.
"If crypto is going to define the future, I want to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It's going to be. It's not going to be made anywhere else.
"And if bitcoin is going to the moon — as we say, 'It's going to the moon' — I want America to be the nation that leads the way. And that's what's going to happen."
It is the reason he has changed his stance from being critical of crypto creating its hype and value "based on thin air," as he said in 2017 during his first administration, the Journal noted.
Also, a Trump-era SEC lawsuit Ripple Labs was lost in part, a notable setback in litigation efforts, the Journal reported.
"Court after court has agreed with our actions to protect investors and rejected all arguments that the SEC cannot enforce the law when securities are being offered — whatever their form," outgoing SEC chair said in a recent speech.
But even Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C., noted the litigation efforts on exchanges is not an efficient way to regulate the burgeoning industry.
"The agency's decision to oversee this billion dollar industry through litigation — case by case, coin by coin, court after court — is probably not an efficient way to proceed, and it risks inconsistent results," Jackson when she dismissed part of SEC's lawsuit against Binance.
The SEC would have been better off with regulations and negotiations instead of lawsuits and fights, according to University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School Executive Director Sarah Hammer to the Journal.
"It wasn't the right approach," she said.
Gensler said he was merely taking the ball from the Trump administration's SEC Chair Jay Clayton, but regardless, any action to curb crypto was going to bring on a high-priced fight with wealthy crypto backers.
"Anything short of rules that were 100% embraced by crypto would have been litigated into oblivion," former director of the SEC's San Francisco office Marc Fagel told the Journal.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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