Trump Nominates Crypto Fan Paul Atkins to Run the SEC

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that Donald Trump has officially nominated Paul Atkins to run the SEC.

On Wednesday afternoon, incoming president Donald Trump announced online that he had tapped crypto-friendly Paul Atkins to be the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Atkins “believes in the promise of robust, innovative capital markets that are responsive to the needs of Investors, and that provide capital to make our Economy the best in the World,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “He also recognizes that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”

In a series of concurrent posts, Trump announced several other nominations, including for his deputy Treasury secretary and assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

The cryptocurrency-focused media outlet Unchained had previously reported that Trump—who once said he’d make America the “crypto capital of the planet”—was, according to three anonymous sources, planning to choose Atkins to head up the commission. Atkins is currently the chief executive of the strategy and risk management consulting agency Patomak Global Partners.

Another crypto outlet, CoinDesk, reported yesterday that Atkins was hesitant to accept the offer, with “a person familiar with Atkins’s thinking” telling the website that it’s “an unattractive role for him because of the amount of work needed to turn around the bloated agency.”

Atkins previously served as an SEC commissioner between 2002 and 2008. His bio on his consultancy’s website adds that he has worked “to develop best practices for digital asset issuances and trading platforms as co-chair of the Token Alliance,” a crypto industry advocacy group, since 2017.

He would in theory need Senate approval to take on the chairship, although speculation has swirled that Trump could force him through sooner with a recess appointment.

“Senate Republicans really respect the tradition of Commissioner Paul Atkins,” George Mason University professor J.W. Verret told Unchained earlier this month. “He was the first time anyone had been a true libertarian and SEC commissioner, and that was a unique thing.”

The pro-crypto Atkins becoming one of the top financial regulators in the country would represent a meaningful shift from the SEC’s approach to crypto under the outgoing Biden administration, whose own SEC chair Gary Gensler cast a skeptical eye on the alternative currency ecosystem and pursued enforcement actions against some of its biggest fish—earning him the industry’s ire.

Trump had promised to fire Gensler “on day one” of his administration, but Gensler announced late last month that he would leave the position willingly in January.

Bitcoin boomed in the wake of Trump’s election, signaling the crypto market’s enthusiasm that a new MAGA status quo will be good for the ecosystem. Among other things, Trump has said he wants to establish a national Bitcoin stockpile.

NPR reports that almost half of corporate spending in the 2024 federal elections came from crypto backers, spurred in part by frustrations with Biden’s regulatory regime.

Trump has already chosen another crypto supporter, Howard Lutnick of the firm Cantor Fitzgerald, to head up the Commerce Department. The twice-elected commander-in-chief has also said he’ll create a crypto advisory council, which major crypto firms are now angling to get seats on.