Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss is gushing over Paul Atkins.
On Wednesday, Winklevoss called the new US Securities and Exchange Commission chair’s deregulatory blitz a “seminal” moment for US equities markets.
The blitz has been referred to as Project Crypto.
“This Commission is taking markets onchain. That’s the TLDR of Project Crypto,” Winklevoss said. “It’s probably one of the most groundbreaking things I’ve read in a very, very long time.”
Crypto advocate
The praise highlights the dramatic shift of crypto chieftains’ attitude towards the SEC. During the tenure of former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency assumed an adversarial stance against the industry by firing off a barrage of enforcement actions against several crypto heavyweights.
With Gensler opting to resign at the onset of the second Trump administration, Donald Trump nominated Atkins to take on the top job. Atkins, a long-time crypto advocate, accepted.
In a July speech at the America First Institute — a think tank founded in 2021 by alumni from the first Trump Administration — Atkins detailed a suite of regulatory changes.
Their goal? To turbocharge the integration of traditional financial markets with blockchain technology and enable the creation of financial “super-apps.”
“Firms — from household names on Wall Street to unicorn tech companies in Silicon Valley — are lined up at our doors with requests to tokenise,” Atkins said.
Moreover, financial firms should be allowed to offer trading in crypto commodities, crypto securities, and traditional securities, as well as staking and lending, without seeking duplicative state and federal licenses, according to Atkins.
Tokenisation refers to the process of putting traditional financial assets on blockchains. Examples of such assets include company stock, commodities, real estate, and bonds.
Tokenised stock has become one of the hottest trends to emerge in the crypto industry this year.
Firms like fintech giant Robinhood and crypto exchange Kraken have made waves by launching services that allow customers to trade tokenised shares.
Winklevoss praise
It is against that backdrop that Winklevoss lavished praise over Atkins on Wednesday.
Winklevoss shared a stage at Wednesday’s conference with executives from crypto firms BitGo and Dinari. All were, unsurprisingly, excited about the prospects of tokenising US stock.
Dinari’s Gabriel Otte called tokenisation the biggest shift in the US financial system since 1933, when the Great Depression spurred new financial regulations.
Winklevoss agreed.
“Once an asset is tokenised, it’s sort of jailbroken from the existing, traditional financial system,” Winklevoss said.
“Today you have to have a broker-dealer account for your equities, [a futures commission merchant] for your commodities, a bank account for your dollars. And if you tokenise, all that can actually live in one place, in a super app. And so this siloed, balkanised, traditional financial world really goes away.”
