The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the U.S. is becoming more hands-on with cryptocurrency regulations than ever before. It is preparing to launch a nationwide tour that will allow its FinHub division to meet with crypto startups and fintech companies to discuss, from the commission’s point of view, legal requirements and restrictions regarding digital asset implementation and use. The ultimate goal of the meetings is to ensure that companies do not attempt to try to offer unregistered securities.
The meetings will get underway on March 26 and the first will be led by the SEC’s San Francisco office. That meeting will be organized by Valerie Szczepanik, who will be discussing tokens and coins during the upcoming meetings. Szczepanik previously led the SEC’s Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group and is now the associate director of the Division of Corporation Finance, as well as the senior advisor for digital assets and innovation at the commission.
According to an SEC statement on the meetings, “FinHub is designed to make the SEC’s fintech work more accessible to innovators, entrepreneurs, and their advisers, and serves as a platform to inform the SEC’s understanding of new financial technologies. FinHub is continuously interested in engagement.”
FinHub was created in October 2018 to help bring order to the digital asset space in the U.S. It facilitates the SEC’s interaction with crypto and FinTech startups and entrepreneurs and also provides an easy mechanism for those entities to engage SEC staff in order to receive clarity on different issues.
According to FinHub’s website, representatives from the group will be traveling across the country in order to conduct “local peer-to-peer” meetings with the fintech community. Individuals will have the opportunity to quiz the SEC representatives on subjects such as regulations or projects, or any other concerns they may have. The meetings will also be an opportunity for participants to share their ideas and feedback with the SEC in an effort to help forge a clearer regulatory environment going forward.
Anyone wishing to participate must first fill out a request form. Along with the submission of the form, they can also include details related to their projects or companies, including white papers, presentations or research data, that they feel might be relevant to the meeting.
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