Gary Gensler stepped down as chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) one year ago Tuesday, the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president.
Many people in the crypto world strongly disagreed with the former SEC chair’s approach to regulating and enforcing digital assets. Because Gensler was against cryptocurrencies, corporations like Ripple Labs probably gave money to political action committees (PACs) and supported politicians in the 2024 US elections who were pro-cryptocurrency and against those who weren’t.
Leadership change and immediate policy reversal
Trump named SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting leader of the agency soon after Gensler stepped down. Under Gensler, SEC policy on digital assets changed completely. Gensler dropped years’ worth of investigations and enforcement proceedings and reorganised the agency’s leadership to include only Republicans.
In February, just over a month after Uyeda took over the SEC from Trump, the agency said it would abandon a civil enforcement action against Coinbase that had been filed in 2023. This case would be the first of many that the SEC would drop against crypto corporations, some of which, like Coinbase, had given money to PACs that supported candidates who were pro-crypto.
Enforcement actions wind down across the sector
After the Coinbase case, the SEC stopped looking into Robinhood Crypto and Uniswap Labs. In March, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse indicated that the SEC would dismiss its appeal of a 2020 enforcement action against the payments business. This was one of the agency’s biggest policy revisions.
In the months that followed Uyeda’s departure and the Senate’s confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the agency, Paul Atkins, there were more firings. Many politicians wondered if the agency had stopped the actions because Trump is close to the crypto business.
Presidential ties to crypto raise conflict questions
The president and his family have supported the cryptocurrency startup World Liberty Financial, which created its own stablecoin when the US Congress was looking into cryptocurrency laws. Trump has his own memecoin called Official Trump TRUMP$5.02. His sons also started a crypto mining business called American Bitcoin.
By June 2025, some estimates said that the president and his family had made more than $1 billion from their crypto enterprises.
Regulatory dialogue continues amid legislative uncertainty
In 2025, the SEC sponsored a series of crypto roundtables where professionals from the industry, law, and policy came together. The agency wanted to know how the securities rules would apply to the sector, so the talks addressed things like financial privacy, digital asset custody, tokenisation, and decentralised finance.
However, SEC officials’ discussions may be irrelevant because members of Congress are attempting to pass a comprehensive cryptocurrency regulatory bill. The Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act aims to establish unambiguous guidelines for financial authorities such as the SEC.
The House passed the bill in July, but the Senate and the banking and agriculture committees have yet to approve it. Members of the Banking Committee were supposed to look at a markup on the measure on Thursday, but the meeting was pushed back when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew his support for the bill.
Shrinking democratic presence at the SEC
Gensler and former SEC Commissioner Jaime Lizárraga were among the first to quit the agency in January 2025, when Trump was sworn in as president. Caroline Crenshaw was the only Democratic commissioner left.
For months, Crenshaw was the only Democrat under the SEC’s leadership and the only one who was sceptical of cryptocurrencies. She departed the agency in January 2026, 18 months after the official conclusion of her mandate.
After leaving public office, Gensler returned to the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is now a professor of finance and the practice of global economics and management. He still talks about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin BTC$93,087 as “speculative” assets in public and in interviews.