SEC’s Hester Peirce Says Crypto Clarity Bill Is Still on Track

Washington has spent years circling crypto. Now, according to SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, it may finally be ready to act.

Commissioner Peirce, who has long pushed for clearer rules around digital assets, says momentum behind the long-debated “crypto clarity” legislation is real, even as last-minute disputes threaten to slow it down.

“There is real consensus in D.C. that we need to have a regulatory framework in place,” she tells Coinage in a new interview. “I’m optimistic that they’ll get to a final bill.”

That moment, after years of what many in the industry viewed as regulatory whiplash, would mark a turning point. For years during the Biden Administration, lawsuit after lawsuit had been filed by the agency under Chair Gary Gensler, who refused to grant any daylight for crypto companies to operate.

As Congress debates the scope of the so-called Clarity Act, the SEC and its counterparts at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are now moving in parallel, issuing guidance and coordinating on a framework that begins to draw long-awaited lines between securities and commodities in crypto.

Still, getting a bill across the finish line was never going to be clean. What’s held things up hasn’t been ideology so much as complexity — particularly around issues like stablecoin yields and capital flows that lawmakers didn’t initially expect to dominate the conversation.

On Monday evening, Punchbowl News reported that a key markup in the Senate Banking Committee may be stalled again. Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who has been leading a compromise between bank lobbyists and crypto supporters, bumped back his timeline for the committee to address the bill from April to May.

"It's very important to me not to accelerate things, to hear everybody, and give them a rational basis for what we do accept," Tillis said.

Even so, Peirce isn’t rattled by the friction. “It’s a broad-ranging bill… it’s not surprising that there are things to work through,” she said. But behind the scenes, the SEC isn’t waiting.

Over the past year, the agency has leaned on its existing authority to begin shaping crypto policy in real time, through staff guidance, interpretive statements, and a joint effort with the CFTC to define a working “token taxonomy.”

“We’re using the authority that we already have,” Commissioner Peirce said, describing the effort as complementary to legislation rather than a fallback.

The reset comes as pressure builds globally. Regulators in other jurisdictions, like VARA in Dubai and others, have moved faster to implement crypto frameworks, raising concerns about whether the U.S. risks falling behind. Commissioner Peirce, for her part, lamented that ideas that she was advocating for more than five years ago have taken this long to nearly make it across the finish line.

Asked to reflect on the agency’s approach under former Chair Gary Gensler, Commissioner Peirce was direct.

“I think we went about it the wrong way… we really lost time because of that,” she said, pointing to an over-reliance on enforcement actions rather than proactive rulemaking.

“The United States is really the place where a lot of people want to come and build things,” she said, pointing to the country’s deep capital markets and developer base as structural advantages that still outweigh regulatory delays.

But that advantage, she suggested, isn’t guaranteed. The question now is whether the framework arrives in time to keep the next wave of innovation from happening somewhere else.

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