Gary Gensler has broken two months of public silence with a combustible appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, granting his first interview since stepping down as chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 20 January. In a 17‑minute exchange with Andrew Ross Sorkin, the former regulator applauded Bitcoin’s staying power while likening most non‑Bitcoin tokens to “sentiment‑driven memes.”
The remarks came as the SEC, under acting chair Mark T. Uyeda, is walking away from headline enforcement actions that defined the Gensler era. Gensler refrained from talking about individual cases, rather emphasizing that the crypto industry has no fundamentals.
Gensler Embraces Bitcoin Maximalism
“I’m going to step back a little bit from any individual cases and just say this again to your viewing public. This is a very small part of the financial markets. But if you were interested in this, think about every financial asset sort of trades on a bit of fundamentals and sentiment. But this field is almost *99 percent – or maybe one might say 100 percent – sentiment and very little on fundamentals,” Gensler said, gesturing toward the market outside Bitcoin.
“And while something like Bitcoin may persist for a long time because there’s seven billion people around the globe, a real keen interest in it, there’s ten‑ or fifteen‑thousand others of these tokens… and if this is just about sentiment, then generally those don’t end up well and most then go down,” he added.
Pressed by co‑host Joe Kernen on whether Bitcoin should be treated differently, Gensler conceded a precious‑metal analogy he had long resisted while in office: “I think the distinction is similar to in metals, there’s only two or three precious metals. We humans have a certain fascination with two or three precious metals like gold. I don’t think we humans will have a fascination with ten‑ or fifteen‑thousand meme or sentiment tokens trading over the years.”
The interview lands amid an unprecedented retreat by the Commission from litigation that Gensler himself had authorised. On 27 February the SEC filed a joint stipulation dismissing its civil action against Coinbase, permanently ending the 20‑month fight over the exchange’s alleged unregistered‑broker activities. Just five weeks later, staff attorneys told Kraken that the agency would abandon its 2023 securities‑exchange complaint “with prejudice,” sparing the exchange both penalties and operational concessions.
The most consequential reversal involves Ripple Labs. On 19 March, CEO Brad Garlinghouse declared victory after learning that the SEC would withdraw its planned appeal of last year’s mixed ruling on XRP sales. A joint motion filed on 11 April asks the Second Circuit to hold all appeals “in abeyance,” effectively closing a four‑year battle that once threatened to define the security status of crypto assets in US law.
During his tenure, Gensler’s enforcement bureau opened or expanded more than 150 crypto cases, arguing that nearly every token except Bitcoin qualified as an unregistered security. His post‑departure rhetoric sharpens that line rather than softening it. By praising Bitcoin’s resilience while dismissing other tokens as speculative “sentiment,” he echoed the Bitcoin‑maximalist thesis that only the original cryptocurrency can function as non‑sovereign money.
At press time, BTC traded at $84,178.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
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