Former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Amanda Fischer has sparked discontent in the crypto community by comparing liquid staking to factors that exacerbated the global financial crisis of 2008.
In a staff statement on Tuesday, the SEC stated that it does not consider certain liquid staking activities to be securities offerings, and therefore they fall outside the agency's regulatory scope.
In a post on X, Fischer compared liquid staking activities to Lehman Brothers' practice of using customer assets as collateral for company trades. The investment bank's collapse is seen as the climax of the 2008 financial crisis.
“The SEC's latest crypto giveaway is a blessing of the same type of re-hypothecation that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers—only worse in the crypto space because you can do it without any SEC or Federal Reserve oversight,” Fischer said.
SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw also criticized the initiative on Tuesday. She pointed out that the SEC's statement is based on assumptions with limited regulatory clarity.
However, SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce supported the agency's decision. “Liquid staking is a new solution to an old problem,” Peirce stated in the SEC's official announcement. She likened liquid staking to practices that enhance the liquidity of similar assets.
Fischer's remarks were not well received by the crypto community, with some industry insiders believing that the SEC's new guidance has positive implications for decentralized finance and institutional adoption of crypto assets.
“You say the SEC is supporting crypto one moment, and then you say crypto is not under SEC regulation the next. Which is it? You contradict yourself in the same post,” Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, replied on X.
Fischer responded to Sigel, clarifying that the SEC “recognizes” liquid staking as not falling under the definition of securities, and thus is not under its jurisdiction.
Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Labs, compared the transparent decentralized nature of blockchain to the opacity of traditional banking systems.
“You either completely misunderstand how liquid staking tokens actually work, or you are willfully ignoring the facts,” Mumtaz added.
New York attorney Jason Gottlieb stated that Fischer's comments are incorrect on both “technical and legal levels.”
“If the re-staking mechanism on the blockchain had existed in 2008, we wouldn’t have faced the problems we did at that time,” Gottlieb said.
Currently, the total locked value (TVL) of liquid staking protocols across all protocols is $66.94 billion, having grown 14.5% year-to-date. However, according to DefiLlama, the TVL briefly fell below $30 billion in April.
Lido Finance currently dominates this category, holding nearly 48% market share. Its TVL is $31.88 billion, down 1.5% year-to-date.
Binance Staking's ETH is the second-largest liquid staking service, with its TVL surging nearly 90% from $6.05 billion at the beginning of the year to $11.4 billion.
Related: SharpLink now holds nearly $2 billion in Ether (ETH) after a $264.5 million purchase.
Original article: “Former SEC Chief of Staff Likens Liquid Staking to Lehman Brothers Collapse, Sparking Strong Reactions”
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