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.
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.
