Hester Peirce, arguably the Securities and Exchange Commission’s most recognizable advocate for the cryptocurrency industry, will leave the agency this autumn to join Regent University School of Law in Virginia as an associate professor. A university press release confirmed on Tuesday, May 19, that Peirce, widely known in the industry as “ Crypto Mom ,” will take up the post in November 2026, where she will teach securities regulation, financial markets, digital assets, and public policy. The appointment is also a reminder that Peirce’s eight-year run at the SEC is drawing to a close. Her second five-year term officially expired in June 2025; however, commissioners may remain in post for up to eighteen more months until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate. This means that Peirce could remain in her post till December 2026. Gregory F. Jacob, who previously served as counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, among several roles in what has turned out to be a stellar career, is also joining Regent University School of Law as the senior associate dean and associate professor. How did Peirce direct the SEC’s relationship with crypto? Peirce was first sworn in as a commissioner in January 2018 after being confirmed by the Senate to fill a Republican vacancy. She was reconfirmed for a second term in August 2020. From the outset, she distinguished herself as a consistent, often lonely, dissenter against what she saw as the agency’s enforcement-first posture toward digital assets. Her nickname was derived from that stance, and it stuck. However, thanks to changing political winds, Peirce is now in good company, having moved from dissenting to leading a Crypto Task Force for the SEC. The SEC appointed Peirce to lead a newly formed Crypto Task Force, a working group charged with developing a clear and practical regulatory framework for digital assets, replacing the agency’s previous strategy of managing the sector primarily through enforcement action. The SEC dropped or settled a string of enforcement cases against Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Robinhood, and others that had defined the Gensler era. Speaking at an industry event, she told the audience she was sorry that “over most of my tenure at the SEC, I failed to convince my colleagues in government to give you a chance.” Crypto Mom still has unfinished business In conversations with industry and legal groups this year, Peirce outlined hopes to advance new rule proposals, develop an innovation exemption to allow firms to test trading in tokenized securities, and embed crypto expertise across the SEC’s permanent staff so that the institutional knowledge would outlast any single commissioner. In one of her most recent public remarks , delivered on May 8 at the SEC’s annual Conference on Financial Markets Regulation, Peirce stated that the proper response to today’s trading environment, with its proliferating options products, retail-driven prediction markets, and crypto ETFs, was restraint grounded in law, not intervention. She was careful to note that such restraint was not a regulatory endorsement of any product, saying that “people should read absolutely nothing about what the SEC or anyone who works here thinks about a product’s usefulness or longevity from the fact that it has gone live on SEC-regulated markets.” What happens to crypto regulation at the SEC without her? Peirce departs as the Atkins-led SEC presses forward with its own reform agenda. The same day the Regent University appointment was announced, the commission proposed amendments to its registered offering framework, stating that it would be the most significant modernization of that framework in over two decades if adopted, alongside changes to ease reporting burdens on smaller public companies. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, who described the proposals as the foundation of his plan to “Make IPOs Great Again,” has long shared Peirce’s instinct for lighter-touch regulation. She had previously served as his counsel when he was a commissioner. How much the crypto regulation scene will change is yet to be seen, but some quarters in the crypto industry still see this as a loss of one of its biggest internal cheerleaders. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .
