The New York Times recently reported that “that the S.E.C. had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto cases that were ongoing when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, moving to pause litigation, lessen penalties or outright dismiss the cases.” It found: “The S.E.C., the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets, is no longer actively pursuing a single case against a firm with known Trump ties, The Times found. It backtracked against every firm that either has relationships with the Trump family’s crypto businesses or has donated to his political causes. The agency’s only remaining crypto cases are against little-known defendants without clear ties to Mr. Trump.”

The agency’s take on that:

• In a statement, the S.E.C. said that political favoritism “had nothing to do with” how it handled crypto enforcement, and that the agency was pivoting for legal and policy reasons, including concerns about its authority to police the industry. The S.E.C. noted that the agency’s current Republican commissioners fundamentally disagreed with filing most crypto cases long before Mr. Trump embraced the industry, and that it “takes securities fraud and investor protection seriously.”

The article interviewed Hester M. Peirce, a Republican commissioner leading the S.E.C.’s new crypto task force, who indeed “said that the decision to backtrack from many of these cases was rectifying a wrong. They should not have been filed in the first place, she said… adding that she believed the cases stifled legitimate innovation.” Well, rather than dig further into that sad landscape, let’s pivot to enjoy a selection of extracts from recent speeches by that same Commissioner Peirce:

• (December 4, 2025) We are a week past Thanksgiving, and I am wondering if I will ever reclaim my refrigerator. Leftovers still occupy every shelf and have spilled into my backup refrigerator, aka my balcony. I am paying for my overly ambitious menu planning. Maybe if I had concentrated on making fewer dishes of higher quality, my guests would have eaten more, and I would not be eating mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce for breakfast for the foreseeable future. This experience got me thinking about corporate governance and shareholder engagement, which happen to be on the menu for our first panel today.

• (September 30, 2025) I am appearing in digital form, which might be appropriate in light of today’s discussions on the tokenization of real-world assets. Had I been with you in person in Singapore, I would have urged you to join me in visiting the famous National Orchid Garden. I have an affinity for orchids because I managed to keep one alive for nearly fifteen years—an amazing feat given my complete lack of gardening skills. Plants that friends have entrusted to my care have not enjoyed similar good health. I have plucked good garden plants thinking they were weeds, inadequately shielded a prized pepper plant from the scorching sun, and under- or overwatered formerly flourishing trees. I am not a good custodian of plants, which brings me to today’s topic—crypto custody.

• (September 26, 2025) A lot of people have asked me what is next…My plan long had been to transition to beekeeping—honey is delicious and nutritious, and bees sting with less glee than most of my Twitter commenters. Casting doubt on the practicality of that vocation, however, was my encounter with my parents’ actual beehive. Dressed in a white suit, gloves, and beekeeper’s veil, I attempted to lift a screen out of the hive as my family looked on. My normally kind father could barely contain his incredulity at my ineptitude; my mother was incensed that I was killing her “precious bees”; and my brother, unprotected by a beekeeper’s suit, pushed me aside to finish the job with an enviable nonchalance. A natural beekeeper I am not.

• (August 4, 2025) The summer on the East Coast has been hot—so hot that, much to my surprise, I find myself craving watermelon, the quintessential summer fruit, but one for which I have a general aversion. I inherited my distaste for watermelon from my grandfather. To make it palatable, he slathered peanut butter on it—a culinary combination that attracted the attention of the neighborhood children at summer picnics. Years later, the telephone operator connecting my grandfather’s call asked, “Are you the Mr. Peirce who puts peanut butter on his watermelon?” The telephone operator had been one of the kids dismayed by my grandfather’s unconventional efforts to make watermelon edible.

So Commissioner Peirce is by her own admission not much good at menu-planning, taking care of plants, beekeeping, or emptying her mind of fruit she doesn’t really like, and that’s just the gleaning of the last few months. But she is really good at removing long-established regulatory protections and facilitating high-risk investor behaviour. Legitimate innovation on her part, or inadequate shielding from the scorching sun…?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.