In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.
“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”
To be fair, the SEC has only really gone after cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin, which is the only major blockchain that uses the energy-intensive Proof-of-Work. The things the SEC was trying to regulate, that it considered securities, are almost entirely running on Proof-of-Stake networks, which have negligible relative energy consumption.
This will almost certainly have a lot of other negative impacts, but I doubt it will have that much on the climate.