SEC announces establishment of new offices to review crypto filings


The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced that it will establish two new offices—the Office of Crypto Assets and the Office of Industrial Applications and Services—to review crypto filings.

“As a result of recent growth in the crypto asset and the life sciences industries, we saw a need to provide greater and more specialized support,” SEC Division of Corporation Finance director Renee Jones said.

The agency explained that both offices would start operating later this fall. The body also added that the offices would operate under the Division of Corporation Finance’s Disclosure Review Program (DRP), which regularly handles corporate disclosure filings.

According to the SEC, these two new offices will review filings for crypto companies, assets and applications. Assigning the tasks to specific offices enables DRP to direct its resources and expertise to handle crypto filing review issues that tend to be unique and continuously changing.

“The creation of these new offices will enable the DRP to enhance its focus in the areas of crypto assets, financial institutions, life sciences, and industrial applications and services and facilitate our ability to meet our mission,” Jones said.

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Last week, SEC head Gary Gensler said that most of the tokens circulating in the crypto market were securities and, therefore, their transactions were covered under securities regulations within the country. Gensler added that he urged his staff to work with crypto entrepreneurs to get their products registered as securities.

Crypto market situation in U.S.

The crypto market situation in the U.S. and the world has continuously deteriorated in recent months. This year, the market valuation of the crypto industry dropped below $1 trillion.

Various crypto assets experienced value drops, including the major ones like BTC and ETH. Since June this year, BTC reportedly has traded between $18,000 and $24,000. In November 2021, the coin saw its all-time high value at $68,990.90. ETH fared better than BTC, but last week, its value remained below the base value at $1,571.20.

Not only that, various crypto companies announced bankruptcy in recent months. The Singapore-based hedge fund Three Arrows Capital declared bankruptcy in July this year. In the same month, crypto lending firm Voyager Capital also filed for bankruptcy.

The Federal Reserve has implemented tight monetary regulations to control inflation that affects the whole country. It hiked the interest rates, which totaled 2.25 percentage points last week. This policy has so far managed to strengthen the value of the U.S. greenback and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield. As a result, investors began to avoid high-risk assets like cryptocurrency, as explained by Vijay Ayyar of the crypto exchange Luno.

"If we see the dollar start to move back down, then we should be able to get risk assets such as bitcoin move back up again,” Ayyar added.

Several crypto companies have rallied and increased their values. Ethereum, the blockchain behind ETH, announced the Merge plan that reportedly would make the network operate more efficiently. According to the developers, this will allow investors to generate bigger yields.

“Ethereum hit yearly highs against the bitcoin pair in anticipation of the merge,” Ayyar said. “Hence there has been a lot more interest and activity in the Altcoin space, while Bitcoin consolidates.”