At the 2025 SEC Speaks conference, the four Commissioners laid out contrasting visions for the agency’s future.

Chairman Paul Atkins called for a principled return to market facilitation and innovation, emphasizing pragmatism over ideology. Commissioner Uyeda championed institutional discipline, celebrating a regulatory reset grounded in statutory mandate.

Commissioner Peirce presented a detailed blueprint for crypto clarity, rooted in economic substance and rule-of-law reasoning. In contrast, Commissioner Crenshaw delivered a forceful warning about institutional unraveling, likening recent deregulatory moves to a game of Jenga poised to collapse.

Together, their remarks reveal not just a contest over policy, but a deeper struggle over how an agency built for twentieth-century finance should navigate twenty-first century uncertainties. In this moment, the SEC is not simply shaping the rules of the market, it is quietly defining the philosophical boundaries of governance itself.

Crypto with clarity 

Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered a characteristically forceful and historically rooted speech, outlining a new regulatory paradigm for crypto.

“The most popular topic of discussion by far in written input and industry meetings has been security status. My short answer to the question—Are crypto assets securities?—is that most currently existing crypto assets in the market are not.”

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce

Drawing inspiration from her ancestor’s quiet rebellion during the American Revolution, she argued for similarly principled resistance to regulatory overreach. Peirce acknowledged that while crypto is not the SEC’s most pressing issue, it has exposed the agency’s failings: chiefly, a reliance on enforcement rather than clear guidance.

As head of the newly formed Crypto Task Force, she emphasized the need to ground regulation in materiality, economic substance, and procedural clarity.

Peirce dissected the longstanding confusion over whether and when crypto assets should be treated as securities.

“The most popular topic of discussion by far in written input and industry meetings has been security status. My short answer to the question—Are crypto assets securities?—is that most currently existing crypto assets in the market are not,” Pierce commented.

She argued that most crypto assets, such as stablecoins, meme coins, NFTs, and network-native tokens, lack the economic features typical of securities, and therefore should not be swept into the SEC’s jurisdiction.

However, she acknowledged that some early-stage crypto asset offerings, particularly when tied to issuer promises or centralized control, may indeed to constitute investment contracts.

In these cases, she called for tailored solutions:

• safe harbor periods for network decentralization;
• registration exemptions for pre-functional tokens; and
• mechanisms to sever investment contracts once issuer obligations are fulfilled.

Crucially, Peirce linked this evolving regulatory vision to the Commission’s ongoing public engagement.

The four recent crypto roundtables, hosted under her Task Force’s direction, have explored everything from classification issues to trading and custody frameworks, culminating in the fourth session on tokenization.

These dialogues, she argued, underscore the need for regulators to embrace transparency, flexibility, and support market experimentation.

Back to basics 

Commissioner Mark Uyeda articulated a forceful return to the Commission’s core mandate: protecting investors, facilitating capital formation, and maintaining fair, orderly markets, without pursuing social policy agendas better handled by other arms of government.

“Specifically, I am heartened by the move away from regulation by enforcement.”

SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda

Comparing the previous administration’s regulatory zeal to the unseen menace of Jaws, Uyeda criticized recent rulemakings, particularly the climate disclosure rule, for overstepping statutory authority and wasting agency resources.

“Specifically, I am heartened by the move away from regulation by enforcement. This is especially true when market participants make efforts to engage with us, but such efforts are rebuffed,” marked Uyeda.

That rule, adopted in 2024 and now challenged in Iowa v. SEC, would have required extensive climate-related disclosures from public companies. Uyeda noted that, rather than rescind it outright, the Commission has strategically chosen to withdraw its defense, allowing the courts to rule on its legality.

Uyeda also underscored recent efforts to re-anchor the SEC’s policymaking in procedural discipline and economic materiality. The agency’s about-face on shareholder proposal guidance, rescinding Staff Legal Bulletin No. 14L and reissuing 14M, was framed as a correction of mission drift, restoring longstanding interpretations of Rule 14a-8.

These course corrections, Uyeda maintained, reflect a principled approach to emerging technologies, one that engages public input and upholds administrative law safeguards.

Finally, Uyeda turned to the future of administrative law judges (ALJs), proposing reforms to ensure fairness, transparency, and constitutional consistency in SEC proceedings. Drawing on SEC v. Jarkesy, he acknowledged widespread criticism that the agency’s in-house courts had tilted too far in favor of enforcement outcomes.

To address this, Uyeda outlined structural adjustments:

• randomly assigning a non-Chair commissioner to oversee each ALJ proceeding;
• limiting the use of administrative forums for high-penalty cases; and
• allowing de novo district court review.

Pro-market, pro-technology SEC

Chairman Paul Atkins offered a vision of regulatory reform rooted in pragmatism, institutional humility, and renewed dialogue with the markets.

“It is critical that a rule’s potential benefits and costs be considered in ensuring that it is in the public’s interest.”

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins

The agency, he suggested, must return to its foundational purpose: enabling capital formation and protecting investors, not micromanaging innovation or freezing evolving technologies under the weight of outdated frameworks.

Among the most telling signals of change was the move to dissolve FinHub as an independent unit and instead weave technological literacy into every division of the SEC.

Rather than isolate expertise in a silo perceived by many as a more punitive than a productive placement, Atkins proposes a cross-cutting approach that embeds innovation capacity across the agency’s enforcement, rulemaking, and advisory functions

Perhaps most notably, Atkins reframed the SEC’s role not as a gatekeeper of orthodoxy but as a steward of adaptive, market-oriented governance. “It is critical that a rule’s potential benefits and costs be considered in ensuring that it is in the public’s interest,” Atkins claimed.

He urged regulators to focus on the structural voids that discourage responsible experimentation, ambiguous IP rights, algorithmic opacity, and overlapping agency mandates, and to adopt a more iterative approach to rulemaking that welcomes public input and technological pluralism.

Chairman Paul Atkins’ call to reconsider the SEC’s long-standing restrictions on closed-end funds investing in private equity and hedge funds could not be more timely. As Atkins noted, private fund assets have nearly tripled in the past decade, and new disclosure tools, enhanced reporting, and better fund governance have reshaped the risk landscape.

But this regulatory evolution intersects with a volatile shift in healthcare investment policy, where private equity is facing a dense and expanding thicket of state-level rules.

In this context, the SEC’s modernization effort is not just a matter of capital access, it is a potential stabilizer for PE healthcare investors navigating a jurisdictional maze. If implemented wisely, such reform could reduce friction in fund structuring and restore clarity for firms operating in an increasingly ambiguous legal environment.

Crenshaw’s warning

Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw used her SEC Speaks address to sound a dire alarm over what she views as a systematic dismantling of the SEC’s institutional and regulatory foundations.

“Like tumbling Jenga pieces, we cannot let our guard down and pull the wrong blocks.”

SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw

Drawing on the metaphor of a precarious game of regulatory Jenga, Crenshaw argued that recent actions by the Commission, ranging from sudden shifts in staff guidance to quiet refusals to defend finalized rules, risk toppling hard-won investor protections.

One of Crenshaw’s most serious charges was the internal erosion of staff capacity and morale. With nearly 15% of the SEC’s workforce lost to attrition or fear of politically motivated purges, she stressed that the agency is undermining the very people who safeguard market stability.

Beyond the personnel crisis, she criticized the Commission’s reliance on opaque staff guidance and selective non-enforcement to rewrite settled law.

Guidance on crypto mining, meme coins, and Schedule 13D/13G filings, she argued, amounted to informal deregulation without the transparency or discipline of rulemaking. Most concerning to Crenshaw was the SEC’s retreat from enforcing rules that have been on the books for decades: a practice she condemned as “regulation by non-enforcement.”

Crenshaw linked these policy shifts to growing blind spots in risk oversight, especially in the crypto sector. She drew parallels to the pre-2008 deregulatory climate, invoking the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s conclusion that the last crash was not fate, but the result of “human action and inaction.” Her message: the warning signs are blinking red, and the SEC is again looking the other way.

Crenshaw cautioned that when history repeats itself, the question is not whether a crisis could have been prevented, but where the regulators were. “Like tumbling Jenga pieces, we cannot let our guard down and pull the wrong blocks,” were Crenshaw’s closing words.