The United States Senate Banking Committee will vote on Dec. 11 whether to renominate Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) commissioner Caroline Crenshaw, a vocal crypto skeptic. Several industry executives have voiced frustration over the possibility of her re-election.
Crenshaw was one of two SEC commissioners to vote against the approval of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded funds (ETF) in January.
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“Caroline Crenshaw is anti-crypto. She even embarrassingly opposed Bitcoin ETFs. The SEC has to change,” crypto exchange Coinbase president and COO Emilie Choi said in a Dec. 7 X post.
Crypto investment firm Paradigm government affairs VP, Alexander Grieve, said it was “one last “gift” for crypto on the way out the door, Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown is trying to ram through the renomination of anti-crypto SEC commissioner Caroline Crenshaw.”
Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart said in a Dec. 7 X post, Crenshaw wasn’t just “an ally” to SEC chair and crypto skeptic Gary Gensler, but was even more “vehemently anti-crypto” than Gensler himself.
“Just read through her dissent letter on the Bitcoin ETF approvals from January,” Seyffart said, adding that the other opposing SEC commissioner, Jaime Lizárraga, “didn’t even join her on that letter.”
Following the SEC approving the spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States on Jan. 10, Crenshaw — who was sworn in as an SEC commissioner in August 2020 — said that the agency’s move to greenlight the ETFs was “unsound and ahistorical.”
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Digital payments company WSPN CEO Austin Campbell said that he wants to “remind all Democrats that Caroline Crenshaw voted that the SEC should disobey a Federal judge, break the law, and instead reject BTC ETFs after being ordered to approve them by a court.”
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It is a change of tone within the crypto industry to SEC announcements, after there was an overall positive tone toward President-elect Donald Trump recently nominating Paul Atkins to replace Gary Gensler as the new chief of the SEC.
This comes just weeks after the securities regulator announced that Gary Gensler will leave the agency on Jan. 20, 2025.
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