Securities And Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton Resigned

The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton has just resigned after heading the biggest regulatory body for the entire crypto industry as we find out today in our cryptocurrency news.

Jay Clayton, the Securities and exchange commission chairman today submitted his letter of resignation to President Donald Trump after serving in this role for three and a half years. Under Clayton’s rules, the SEC chased a few high-profile crypto projects which it alleged that they held unregistered securities offering. The SEC mounted its biggest offense yet yesterday when it filed the lawsuit against Ripple Labs for allegedly raising $1.3 billion in unregistered securities sales since 2013. Right after the lawsuit, the price of the coin dropped.

"We determined that bitcoin was not a security, it was much more a payment mechanism and stored value," says SEC Chairman Jay Clayton on #btc. "Our current payment mechanisms–have inefficiencies those inefficiencies are the things that are driving the rise of bitcoin." pic.twitter.com/3r1mxzfgpi

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) November 19, 2020

Among other bigger crypto projects that incurred the wrath of the SEC is Block.one which in late 2019 eventually settled with the SEC over its $4 billion ICO for the EOS blockchain, as well as Telegram which this past spring was obliged to return $1.7 billion of investors’ money after the case with the SEC, collapsed the project.

Securities, the asset class that the SEC regulates, refer to investment contracts. The Clayton-era SEC has spent much of the past three years working out whether cryptocurrency tokens constitute investment contracts. If one coin creator marketed the coin as an investment, investors would not buy the tokens to use them in the crypto network but rather on the future worth of the token which had not registered sales of the coin with the SEC but the agency could chase after the projects and will sue.

Clayton determined back in June that BTC didn’t constitute a security under the law and has maintained the position during his tenure at the commission. Clayton reiterated:

“We determined that bitcoin was not a security, it was much more a payment mechanism and stored value.”

In his resignation letter, Clayton tanked his 4500 SEC staffers that worked with him since 2017 and also thanked them for the service to investors, the markets, and the country. Clayton planned to step down in 2021 but announced that he would leave by the end of the year.

As recently reported, The SEC officially filed the $1.3 billion lawsuit against XRP’s creator, Ripple for holding an unregistered security sale. The lawsuit filed a day ago in a Manhattan court alleged that ripple raised $1.3 billion in an unregistered securities offering since 2013.