Cryptocurrency market players seem to be rallying against the SEC

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire believes that the banking crisis and the difficulties of regulating the cryptocurrency industry in the U.S. were the main reasons that contributed to the fall in the capitalization of the USDC. Stablecoin issued by Circle is now in second place by market capitalization after Tether.

As recently as last summer, USDC had a combined value of $56 billion, but as of the end of April 2023, it had fallen by about half, to $30.7 billion.

“We’re seeing tremendous anxiety around the world about the U.S. banking system. We see concern about the regulatory environment in the U.S.,” the Circle CEO said.

Circle’s difficulties came after the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank, where the company held about $3.3 billion in assets. Under stable conditions, the firm’s Stablecoin should be pegged to the U.S. dollar at a 1:1 ratio. But after the bank collapsed, the USDC exchange rate dropped to $0.85 in more than 24 hours.

New information recently emerged regarding the position of the current head of the SEC. It turns out that in 2018, Gary Gensler said that three-quarters of the cryptocurrency market is “not securities.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong commented on the video with one word — “wow.”

This is important for the industry, as Gensler recently hinted again at the possibility of recognizing all crypto-assets, with the exception of bitcoin, as securities. He later noted that all coins on the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm qualify for this status.

That said, during one of Gensler’s 2018 lectures at MIT, he stated that a significant portion of crypto coins are commodities.

A user named ZK_shark, who posted the video, wrote that he had more than 100 excerpts from Gary Gensler’s course and was willing to share them.

“I marked them because they represent a conflict of interest or are inconsistent with his [Gensler’s] recent testimony before Congress,” ZK_shark wrote.