SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce to Leave Post on Oct. 2

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has submitted her formal resignation, effective Oct. 2, ending about eight years on the commission including a stint leading its Crypto Task Force. She posted a copy of the resignation letter on her X account Friday, Cointelegraph reported.

In the letter, she thanked the president for the "honor of her professional lifetime" and said she was leaving the agency under Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda, the two remaining members, both Republicans. Her final day is Oct. 2, CoinDesk wrote.

Peirce, often called "Crypto Mom" by industry supporters, spent years pressing for written crypto rules while the agency pursued enforcement cases instead. She pushed for regulations during the chairmanships of Republican Jay Clayton and Democrat Gary Gensler, both of whom ran aggressive crypto enforcement agendas, and she finally got a rulemaking role under President Donald Trump. She took charge of the new Crypto Task Force last year, before Atkins arrived as chairman.

Her term officially expired in June 2025. Commissioners may stay on for about 18 months after a term ends if no replacement is named, which allowed her to remain into this fall.

The task force became the center of her late tenure. Since Feb. 4, 2025, she served as its director, examining how existing securities laws apply to digital assets and decentralized systems. Its output included policy statements and guidance on mining, staking, memecoins and a series of definitions for sorting crypto assets and deciding which regulator covers them. More recently the agency began proposing formal rules, starting with a framework known as Regulation Crypto Assets that sets up a path for offering crypto assets without triggering full securities registration.

The agency's most watched move may have been tokenized securities. The effort known as the innovation exemption is meant to open a limited, five-year window for tokenized stock trading that would feed into permanent rules later.

"Maximizing people's freedom to choose what is best for themselves and their families within sensible regulatory parameters designed to give them the confidence to transact with others is a delicate and vitally important task for the regulator," Peirce wrote in her resignation, according to CoinDesk.

She acknowledged the "Crypto Mom" nickname in a 2019 speech delivered when the agency resisted industry rulemaking. In that speech she said the agency had hindered innovation and growth, adding that the only guidance out of the SEC was "a parade of enforcement actions and a set of staff guidance documents and staff no-action letters."

Peirce plans to join the law school of Regent University in Virginia as an associate professor in November, Cointelegraph noted. The university expects her to help build teaching in federal litigation, securities regulation and digital assets.

Her seat may sit empty for a while. Caroline Crenshaw, the previous Democratic commissioner, departed in January, 18 months after her term ended, and the White House has named no successor for that seat either. To date, the administration has declined to name Democratic nominees to the SEC or its sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Since Trump took office in January 2025, the SEC has dropped several enforcement actions and investigations into crypto companies, including some tied to Trump and his family. Peirce's remarks in June fit that shift: she said publishing open-source code should not subject software developers to federal securities rules, weighing in on a long dispute over developer liability in decentralized finance. Her stance matched the wider move away from what Atkins has described as regulation by enforcement.

Even as she announced her exit, the agency kept issuing crypto guidance. On Friday it published a frequently asked questions document meant to clear up how it defines tokens and what it expects from project marketing. The document takes up how teams can avoid triggering consideration as providers of essential managerial efforts, addresses staking receipt tokens, and asks when a secondary market might count as a promoter of an investment contract. The comment period on a related proposal runs past her departure, closing Oct. 20.

Her exit leaves the commission with two members. Agency rules allow two members to act as a quorum when the commission is short-handed, so formal business can continue. It remains unclear whether Trump will now seek to fill the vacancies.