In a Thursday interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) boss Gary Gensler reiterated that Bitcoin does not qualify as a security under his agency’s regulatory purview.
Gensler cited the landmark approval of nearly a dozen spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January, now trading on US exchanges, as proof of Bitcoin’s non-security status.
“As it related to Bitcoin, my predecessor and I have said that’s not a security,” he said. “You now have a way that you can actually express that view — buy into that through exchange-traded products.”
Gensler has long held the view that most cryptocurrencies, besides Bitcoin, are securities under U.S. laws and, thus, subject to SEC regulation.
Today, he asserted that the crypto industry cannot continue without adequate investor protection, pointing to the implosion of high-profile crypto companies that led to gargantuan customer losses.
When asked about the crypto sphere’s complaints about the murky rules, Gensler countered, “Not liking the rules is not the same as denying that there are rules.
While Gensler has refrained from publicly affirming Ethereum’s non-security status, industry commentators saw the SEC’s decision to approve spot ETH ETFs as a sign the regulator considered the second-biggest crypto a commodity.
Is Dogecoin A Security Or Not?
Meanwhile, Dogecoin creator Billy Markus (aka Shibetoshi Nakamoto) has urged Gensler also to declare Dogecoin a nonsecurity since the OG meme coin copied its code from Bitcoin’s original codebase, and both cryptocurrencies basically work the same.
However, an X user by the name of Daniel told Markus that, unlike Bitcoin, DOGE has an infinite supply. The meme coin inventor argued that this is simply a single line of code that could be changed with the approval of miners. “Same exact process as Bitcoin,” Markus concluded while criticizing Daniel for not being intelligent.
It’s worth noting that the SEC has not named Dogecoin as a security in any of its numerous regulatory enforcement actions against crypto exchanges. However, neither the Commission nor its boss, Gensler, has openly approved DOGE as a non-security.