Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler has asked Congress for $109 million asked to tackle the crypto market, which he calls “the Wild West”. If Congress grants this request, the SEC’s total budget will increase to $1.4 billion. In the current fiscal year, the SEC took action 750 times, collecting $6.4 billion in fines.
Need new tools
“Meanwhile, rapid technological innovation in the financial markets has led to crime in new areas, including the crypto space. Addressing those violations requires new tools, expertise and resources,” Gensler told Congress.
Further, the SEC chairman asked for an additional $393 million for “tech costs.” This includes costs for data analysis and cyber security.
“To put these numbers into context, this spending dwarfs what some of the largest market participants spend on technology in a month,” Gensler told the senators.
In total, the chairman of the SEC wants to increase his agency’s budget to $5.1 billion for the fiscal year. That’s a gigantic bucket of cash for a financial watchdog, which some people wonder if it’s worth it.
The war on crypto
For the crypto industry, it is to be hoped that Gensler does not get the money he is asking for. For some time now, the SEC has started a kind of war against crypto. In recent weeks, this has manifested itself in lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase, the two largest exchange platforms in the industry.
Furthermore, of course, we already had the lingering lawsuit between Ripple and the SEC, in which the judge (somewhat surprisingly) sided with the crypto world. As a result, the price of XRP shot up, but so did many other altcoins.
That’s because a large group of altcoins were labeled securities by the SEC in the lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance. Now that the court has ruled that XRP does not qualify as a security, it is unlikely that the other altcoins will.