Hester Peirce Bids Farewell to the SEC After Nearly 30 Years

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks on Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Capital Markets Summit in Washington, D.C. The address closed a tenure that made her the agency's most prominent voice for crypto-industry clarity.

In the speech, titled "Peirce Out," Peirce confirmed she is leaving the agency after nearly 30 years in Washington, saying she is "moving to the beach." She will join Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach as an associate professor in November, per Bloomberg. Her second term as commissioner expired in June 2025 and she has been serving in a holdover capacity since.

Crypto Gets a Nod in the Farewell

Peirce did not give the speech over to crypto. Her remarks at the Chamber of Commerce summit covered a broad sweep of securities regulation, from climate disclosure rules to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to the SEC's use of disgorgement as a remedy. But she singled out the agency's digital assets work as an example of the Commission returning to its statutory lane.

She described the past year-and-a-half of SEC crypto work as the agency's effort "to tie our crypto regulatory and enforcement activities to the statutes we administer." That framing was a pointed contrast to the Gary Gensler era, when Peirce repeatedly dissented from what she called the agency's reliance on litigation rather than rulemaking. After Gensler's exit, the SEC's digital-asset enforcement and rulemaking was reset under Chairman Paul Atkins through an initiative known as Project Crypto.

Peirce's dissent from the Gensler approach dated back years. She once called the agency's enforcement-first posture a "paternalistic and lazy" way to regulate, and described the rules for the space as a "regulatory version of an escape room" offering no way out for compliant firms.

What She Is Leaving Behind

Beyond crypto, Peirce used the speech to catalog the work she sees as unfinished. She raised constitutional concerns about the SEC's pay-to-play rule for investment advisers, arguing it functions as a financial disincentive against political speech. She also pushed back on the agency's expansive reading of internal-accounting-controls requirements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, calling it a "lever" to discipline companies over controls unrelated to accounting.

The Consolidated Audit Trail, which she described as "a massive market surveillance monitoring operation," also drew scrutiny. The SEC issued a concept release in April asking questions about the CAT's civil-liberties and privacy implications, a direction Peirce endorsed.

She cited several recent Commission actions as progress: the rescission in May of the rule preventing settling defendants from publicly denying allegations, the proposed rollback of climate disclosure rules, and the April effort to trim the Form PF reporting burden on private funds.

Peirce closed with a call for bipartisan ground around what she called the "boring basics": updating transfer agent rules, modernizing investor disclosure technology, reforming investment-company proxy processes. "We will not agree on every detail," she said, "but the joint work of getting to a good place might build good will that can be applied to areas of deeper disagreement."

A Thinned Commission

Peirce's departure will leave the SEC at two commissioners. The agency's rules allow it to operate with fewer than three, but a two-person commission has no modern precedent and would complicate rulemaking and enforcement proceedings where a tie vote produces no decision.

The Defiant has covered Peirce's work on tokenization in recent months, including her efforts to clarify the line between tokenized securities and synthetic instruments and her guidance on the scope of the proposed innovation exemption for onchain stock trading. Those positions remain in force until her seat is filled.

Peirce joined the SEC in 2018, filling the seat vacated by Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, and was renominated by President Trump and confirmed to a second term in 2020. She is the last Republican holdover commissioner.