SEC’s Crypto Mom Hester Peirce Resigns, Effective Oct. 2

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, the agency’s best-known ally of the crypto industry, has resigned effective Oct. 2, 2026, she said in a post on X.

A Resignation Letter Posted Online

Peirce announced the departure in a Sept. 25 post reading “T minus 7,” attached to a photo of her resignation letter. The letter calls serving at the agency “the honor of my professional lifetime” and says she leaves confident that the “talented men and women of the Securities and Exchange Commission” will keep striking the balance she describes, under Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioner Mark Uyeda.

Appointed by President Donald Trump, Peirce took her seat on January 11, 2018 and stayed for nearly nine years. She kept pushing for crypto rules through the chairmanships of Jay Clayton and Gary Gensler, both of whom ran aggressive enforcement agendas against the industry. Her term expired June 5, 2025, and she served on in holdover capacity, which SEC rules allow for up to 18 months. Industry gave her the nickname “Crypto Mom,” though she has said she sees herself as a “freedom maximalist” rather than an industry advocate.

In November she joins Regent University School of Law as an associate professor teaching securities regulation and digital assets. The university announced the hire in May.

A Farewell Argument on Privacy

Two days before posting the letter, Peirce argued in a speech at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s digital assets conference in New York that regulators can catch criminals while collecting less personal data. Bigger “haystacks” of stored information make the needles harder to find, she said, and every stored data point raises the risk of leaks or misuse.

She pointed to zero-knowledge proofs and attribute-based credentials, tools that can confirm facts such as a person’s age or sanctions-list status without exposing the underlying data, and urged firms to rely on identity checks already performed by other regulated institutions rather than duplicating them. The speech is published on the SEC’s website.

Her departure leaves the SEC with two seated commissioners, Atkins and Uyeda, the bare minimum needed to act, and three empty seats. Peirce led the agency’s Crypto Task Force from 2025 and championed proposals such as safe harbor periods for token projects. No successor has been named, and the White House has not yet put forward nominees for the open seats.