Waters urges hearing with SEC Chair Atkins on crypto cases

Rep. Maxine Waters has asked the House Financial Services Committee to convene a hearing with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins on the SEC’s handling of cryptocurrency enforcement, including dismissed or stayed actions. The request came in a letter sent Sunday to Committee Chair French Hill.

Waters wrote that a hearing is overdue and urged the panel to review what she called “questionable policy changes” at the agency. Her letter seeks examination of why certain cases were dropped or paused and how the SEC plans to oversee digital-asset markets.

In the letter, Waters asserted that the SEC “has terminated or stayed major enforcement actions against multiple crypto companies and individuals that had been credibly accused of major violations of our securities laws, including Coinbase, Binance, and Justin Sun.” She added: “In some of these cases, the defendants had announced that the SEC had terminated enforcement actions even before the Commission had taken the actual vote to do so.” She wrote that the committee should ask how the SEC “intends to deter fraud and manipulation.”

Waters outlined ten oversight topics for the session, including the SEC’s independence, politicization, and market surveillance. She also pointed to what she described as a friendlier approach to crypto under Atkins, citing relaxed rules for crypto exchange-traded funds and an initiative she referred to as Project Crypto. 

Waters is the ranking Democrat on the committee. Hill leads the panel that oversees the SEC. A hearing date has not been announced. The SEC has not publicly responded to the issues raised in the letter.

As we covered previously, on December 15, 2025, SEC Chair Paul Atkins told the SEC Crypto Task Force’s sixth roundtable that national security goals can be balanced with individual privacy in digital assets. 

He cautioned that rules treating all wallets like brokers and making every transaction reportable could turn crypto into a surveillance system, since public blockchains allow transactions to be linked to users. He said a balanced framework is possible and that privacy should be built in by design.