Hester Peirce – aka ‘Crypto Mom’ – issued a statement on Wednesday arguing that the SEC’s enforcement action is neither “efficient nor fair,” and that exchanges were never given a realistic pathway to registration, to begin with. 

“Using enforcement actions to tell people what the law is in an emerging industry is not an efficient or fair way of regulating,” she said. “Moreover, staking services are not uniform, so one-off enforcement actions and cookie-cutter analysis does not cut it.”

On the contrary, Peirce believes the SEC has merely shut down a program that once “served people well” – one that Kraken will never be able to revive later, register or not. 

“A paternalistic and lazy regulator settles on a solution like the one in this settlement,” she concluded. “Do not initiate a public process to develop a workable registration process that provides valuable information to investors, just shut it down.”