US SEC head resigns from office

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton has confirmed that he will leavePosition atafter three and a half years, the agency said in a statement.

Chairman Jay Clayton confirms he will conclude his tenure at the end of the year after redoubling the Commission's focus on Main Street investors and completing a historically productive rulemaking agenda.More here: https://t.co/EpBfZvAQML

— SEC_News (@SEC_News) November 16, 2020

Clayton was sworn in on May 4, 2017 after President Donald Trump came to the White House and has served as head of the SEC for the longest time ever.

According to the statement, the Commission is led byClayton "empowered businesses of all sizes to raise capital in both public and private markets, with reliable and effective investor protection."

The regulator has also "strengthened its investigative and law enforcement programs by establishing various annual reports."

During Clayton's term, the SEC achievedorders for payment of fines and refunds of funds in the amount of more than $ 14 billion and returned $ 3.5 billion to investors. The record was the 2020 financial year, for which the regulator collected $ 4.68 billion, of which $ 1.26 billion fell on ICO Telegram and token sales of cryptocurrency companies.

During Clayton's tenure, the SEC paid out $ 565 million to whistleblowers, including a record $ 114 million award in program history.

Under Clayton's presidency, the regulator acknowledged that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities, which allowed the launch of regulated futures based on these assets.

However, the Commission never approved the applications forlaunch of exchange-traded funds (ETF) based on the first cryptocurrency. The latest, filed by Wilshire Phoenix, was rejected by the SEC in February this year. Clayton recently announced that the regulator is ready to consider creating tokenized ETFs.

SEC previously announced expansion plansmonitoring smart contracts underpinning the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space. Commissioner of the regulator Hester Pierce believes that the Commission will have many difficult questions for the sector.

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