A commissioner from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Hester Peirce has recently argued the potential of self-regulation when it comes to the cryptocurrency markets. Peirce made her comments during a public talk with the former Commodity Futures Commission chairman Gary Gensler at the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019 which took place on 9th March. In terms of what Peirce was talking about was in context to a proposal from Gensler that a more robust and unified national level regulatory framework would be desirable. As Gensler’s opinion, this would encompass not trading platforms that offer security tokens or complex investment instruments but also those that list commodities like Bitcoin. Peirce responded to this saying: “One really important thing to remember is that people regulate each other in their interactions with one another, and that’s the whole purpose of the Bitcoin idea, that it would be a community that would be able to regulate itself. As problems arise, people in that community are thinking about how to deal with those problems. One model would be to have a government regulator, but I don’t think that’s the only model.” Gensler arguments were in favour of extending regulation on a national level but over a broader spectrum of crypto trading centred on improving investor protection, coordinating money laundering prevention and addressing the current regulatory and enforcement discrepancies across the different states. In a short-lived debate with Gensler over dealing with this jurisdictional regulatory separation, Peirce emphasised the “status quo”, which states that a statutory obligation to enforce money transmission laws under the Bank Secrecy Act but will nonetheless regulate aspects of the cryptocurrency markets with significantly different degrees of latitude. Peirce went on to state, “that’s the regulatory model we’ve chosen. I think, again, these markets could regulate themselves if we lived in a world where we allowed that.” The SEC commissioner went on to support for a lighter regulatory touch when possible. She nonetheless affirmed that security offerings which must comply with the SEC’s registration requirements and supported the ongoing efforts by major crypto trading platforms to register with the agency as either exchange or as alternative trading venues in order to be able to compliantly list security tokens.