The SEC’s Hester Pierce wants more decentralization in the financial system

United States Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Pierce has advocated for more decentralization in the US financial system, along with crypto regulation and enforcement.

Hester Pearce, also known as the ‘Mother of Crypto', closed out her fiery conversation with CNBC's Mackenzie Sigalos at the ETDenver conference by arguing that decentralization would benefit the US financial system.

“Centralization means you have concentrated risks,” she said before adding.

“Decentralization can bring strength and stability to the financial system. So I want to see more strength and stability…points of centralization always keep me up at night.”

Former attorney Hester Pearce was appointed by former President Donald Trump to the SEC in 2018. She is affectionately known as ‘Crypto Mom' for her support of the industry and has often protested against over-regulation of digital assets.

Earlier in the speech, Pearce responded to questions about the proposed legislation, which would deal with decentralized technologies such as network nodes, verifiers, decentralized wallets, mining pools and blockchain software, such as financial institutions.

“It's frustrating,” Pearce said, adding that there is a lot of confusion about who should sign up.

Sigalos also said that the broker/dealer regulation would redefine the classification of exchanges and affect and include DeFi, decentralized exchanges and developers, to which Pearce responded:

“The whole concept of decentralization is the opposite of what we're used to at the SEC.”

“When people are working together and someone is dealing with a code rather than a person or an entity, it's a real challenge for the SEC what to do with that,” she added.

She added that “it's not even the role of the SEC to get comfortable with crypto.”

“Our job is to help people define where the safeties are and to help people make their own decisions about where the safety rules are.”

The SEC adopted rules on February 6 requiring more market participants to register with it and comply with federal securities laws that would bring DeFi into greater scrutiny.

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Pearce added that currently the SEC is in “enforcement mode”, but there should be provisions that allow projects to grow and decentralized prosecution.

“You don't follow people who ask for clear rules on how to proceed in this position.”

The SEC commissioner also spoke about a wide range of crypto-related topics including the future of the agency following the US presidential election later this year, the place of Bitcoin ETFs, and CBDCs, combined with the specter of state financial surveillance.

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