Crypto Lobbyists Plead With SEC: “Let Us Stake in Peace!” 🕵️‍♂️💸

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Ladies and gentlemen, consider: nearly thirty abnormally caffeinated congregations—crypto aficionados swaddled in digital certainties and trembling code—herded and harried, shepherded by the discreet charms of the Crypto Council for Innovation. Like moths besotted by phosphorescent possibility, they have flitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s stoic lamp, plaintively begging for a few, just a few, morsels of regulatory morsels regarding staking—oh, staking!

From the upstanding aviary of the CCI, the Proof of Stake Alliance (with a name so earnest one expects it emblazoned on banners at a tech summer camp), discharged an April 30 billet-doux to Hester “Crypto Mom” Peirce, champion of all things decentrally perplexing. The authors, their quills vibrating with nerdly indignation, pronounced staking not some fevered Wall Street bacchanal, but instead merely: “a technical process.” Quite right—after all, why regulate the plumbing of one’s virtual monastery? 🚰

“Staking isn’t niche—it’s the backbone of the decentralized internet,” thundered the letter, omitting perhaps with tragic oversight the vital role of caffeine in all decentralized structures. 

Our correspondents wrote in answer to the SEC’s open invitation to muse aloud: Should staking, a wondrous ritual wherein tokens repose and multiply like rabbits in moonlight, be subsumed beneath the sooty wings of federal securities law?

With much rhetorical flailing, the coalition urged the SEC to “actually chill,” and let features such as staking bloom in those delightfully illiquid exchange-traded pastures, unburdened by prescriptive frost that might, horror of horrors, “freeze market structures and stifle innovation.” One mustn’t overcook the soufflé of progress!

Their argument pirouetted around the vinegary Howey test—“Lo, it is not an investment!” they asserted, with fingers crossed and a wink—seeing as those who stake remain, equally, the proud unflinching owners of their fungible baubles.

Further, they illuminated the room—gently, so as not to alarm any SEC functionaries—by explaining that blockchain itself, that enigmatic deity, bestows the rewards. Providers? Mere acolytes! No managerial bamboozlement, no executive caprices—just the clockwork grace of protocol. 🔧⏰

Dare one dream, the letter beseeched, of principles-based guidance, echoing those vague affirmations the SEC has muttered about proof-of-work mining. Is a little ambiguity so much to ask after a decade of chaos?

“Imagine!” they marveled, “in four months, more movement than Rip Van Winkle in four years! The industry now produces—behold!—concrete principles, ripe for plucking by regulatory hands!” Such progress, such collaborative ballet between pirates and the port authority.

With the briskness of a satisifed crossword puzzle whiz, the group concluded that “existing securities disclosure” is utterly, charmingly useless for a world of pipes, nodes, and—yes—arcane techno-wizardry. Please, do not ask software to wear a suit and tie. 🦾

What’s in a Staker? The Great and the Good

The Alliance, not to be outdone in star-power, boasts luminaries: Andreessen Horowitz (that a16z of potent Silicon Valley aura), Consensys (blockchain’s indispensable utility infielder), and Kraken—who returned staking to America with all the quiet subtlety of a circus elephant.

Meanwhile, the SEC, with Hamletian uncertainty, dithers and delays, ETF approval hiding just out of reach. Grayscale’s spot Ether ETF? Suspended somewhere between anticipation and inertia since April 14.

But wait—there’s more! In April, the sage of Bloomberg, James Seyffart, cast chicken bones and declared: an Ether ETF (staking included, naturally) may—just may!—grace us with its presence as soon as May. Or, knowing crypto’s whimsical muse, perhaps in the afterlife. ⏳🐢

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2025-05-01 06:42