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SEC's Clayton Says Payment Inefficiencies Are Boosting Bitcoin's Rise
Clayton sounded more bullish on bitcoin than he's been in years in his Thursday interview with CNBC.
Sounding more bullish on the cryptocurrency than he has in years, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said Thursday the inefficiencies of modern payment systems are "driving the rise of bitcoin."
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
- Speaking on CNBC, Clayton, who's stepping down at the end of the year, said: "What we are seeing is that our current payment mechanisms domestically and internationally have inefficiencies. Those inefficiencies are the things that are driving the rise of bitcoin."
- Bitcoin was trading a tick below $18,000 at press time Thursday as the bull run continues to drive the cryptocurrency near all-time highs.
- Clayton rebutted interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin's suggestion that bitcoin could ever be regulated as a security. Bitcoin "was much more a payment mechanism and stored value" than a security, he said.
- That doesn't mean the SEC is comfortable with the crypto quite yet. Under Clayton, the SEC has repeatedly blocked a number of potential bitcoin exchange-traded funds from launching.
- Clayton nevertheless seemed to echo JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's Wednesday prediction that regulators would eventually come knocking as bitcoin continues to grow.
- "I think we're going to see this mature and I think we're going to see more regulation around the payments space," he said.
Kevin Reynolds
Kevin Reynolds is editor-in-chief at CoinDesk. Prior to joining the company in mid-2020, Reynolds spent 23 years at Bloomberg, where he won two CEO awards for moving the needle for the entire company and established himself as one of the world's leading experts in real-time financial news. In addition to having done almost every job in the newsroom, Reynolds built, scaled and ran products for every asset class, including First Word, a 250-person global news/analysis service for professional clients, as well as Bloomberg's Speed Desk and the training program that all Bloomberg News hires worldwide are required to take. He also turned around several other operations, including the company's flash headlines desk and was instrumental in the turnaround of Bloomberg's BGOV unit. He shares a patent for a content management system he helped design, is a Certified Scrum Master, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He owns bitcoin, ether, polygon and solana.
Danny Nelson
Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.
