Usa Securities and Substitution Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce, known colloquially as "Crypto Mom," has slammed the SEC for its $10-1000000 settlement with cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex.

The SEC announced the $10-million settlement on Monday, with Poloniex being charged with facilitating trades in unregistered securities betwixt July 2017 and November 2019.

The SEC asserted that Poloniex employees "stated internally" that they wanted to be "aggressive" in circumventing securities regulation in a bid to increase market place share by listing new digital assets that may be deemed securities under the Howey Test of 1946. Poloniex elected to neither acknowledge nor deny whatever wrongdoing.

On the aforementioned day, Peirce slammed the regulator's actions in a public statement, emphasizing the opaque regulatory framework that crypto firms must navigate in the Usa.

The commissioner highlighted several regulatory matters that the SEC has been criticized for failing to analyze with regards to digital asset businesses, including how to determine whether an nugget is a security and what licenses and exemptions are appropriately required to operate a cryptocurrency exchange:

"Given how slow we have been in determining how regulated entities tin can interact with crypto, market participants may understandably be surprised to run across us come onto the scene now with our enforcement guns blazing and debate that Poloniex was non registered or operating under an exemption as it should have been."

Peirce added if Poloniex had tried to register as a securities exchange or as an alternative trading system with the SEC, the firm "likely would have waited...and waited...and waited some more than."

Related: Crypto Mom: True decentralization is the just affair that will save DeFi projects

USD coin (USDC) Stablecoin issuer Circle acquired Poloniex for $400 million dorsum in 2018. In Oct of the following yr, Circle spun out Poloniex'south exchange business, selling it to a consortium of investors.

In November 2019, Cointelegraph reported that Tron founder Justin Sun was among the investors who had acquired the commutation.