SEC is seeking Blockchain data to study the crypto market

According to the recent announcement made by the United State’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US market watchdog is going to conduct cryptocurrency market research and is looking for Blockchain data sources.

As the announcement states the SEC wants to determine the technical capability and availability of large and small businesses to provide Blockchain data in order to support the SEC with the market research. According to SEC, this data will be used to improve compliance, monitor risk and inform commission policy with respect to digital assets. The agency is also searching for the data on popular Blockchains for studying and monitoring the transaction details.

The news on studying the decade-old market comes with no surprise as in the last year SEC started getting a lot friendlier with FinTech and just one month earlier the agency has announced that cryptocurrency is one of the top priorities for research in 2019.

SEC is trying to get a hold on the crypto market

As the announcement explained there are several key factors of cryptocurrency market and Blockchain transactions that SEC wants to study and monitor closely. The market watchdog is seeking for the detailed data on the sector including the processes that are used to extract them. In addition to that, it also needs seeing the verifications steps to ensure any data losses as it happens very often because of the tools used for data transformation and the applied processes.

Moreover, the US watchdog is also determined to have the ability to identify the wallet addresses owners for multiple cryptocurrencies in order to bring the transparency in the market. SEC also emphasized the importance of the accuracy of data provided and requested the interested companies to parse the data before submitting it to the agency.

With this news, it is getting more clear the agency is trying to get a hold on the US cryptocurrency market. The SEC is especially interested in the projects that are opting to raise funds via initial coin offerings (ICOs). However, while the agency is getting more and more involved in the cryptocurrency market there is still a big debate going on the proper classification of the tokens. It is still not decided whether or not the tokens – issued by the Blockchain firms fall under the securities.

In the recent past, due to the SEC hostility, many of the Blockchain firms were forced to take advantage of a loophole. Instead of the general public in the country, the Blockchain firms promoted their products only to accredited investors. Opting to raise funds through this loophole over 300 ICOs were approved by the SEC in 2018.