Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has heaped praise on the current U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins.
He has compared the current regulatory environment under SEC Chair Paul Atkins with the hostile regime of his predecessor, Gary Gensler.
The Ripple executive praised Atkins as a “model of what leadership at the SEC should look like.”
“The SEC’s first mission is to protect investors. Under Gary Gensler, the SEC clearly lost its way,” Garlinghouse stated. “He declared war on a technology… It was an unlawful power grab…and the courts said as much.”
Garlinghouse concluded his statement by calling Atkins “a breath of fresh air and sanity.”
Bitter rivalry
The effusive praise for Atkins comes after Garlinghouse spent years chastizing the former SEC boss Gensler.
During Gensler’s rather tumultuous tenure, Ripple was enmeshed in a multi-year legal battle with the SEC over the status of its XRP token, which was initially started by Chairman Clayton.
As reported by U.Today, the Ripple boss previously stated that Gensler had become a political liability, insisting that the former chair had single-handedly “destroyed” the integrity of the SEC.
Garlinghouse has also famously labeled the outgoing chair “the Luddite of his time,” blaming his anti-crypto stance for hindering US financial innovation. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen went even further, dubbing Gensler the “worst public servant of all time.”
“A new day”
Atkins has stressed that the goal of the SEC is to ensure that the US remains the safest place to invest.
“We’ve pivoted from the old practice of regulation through enforcement…Rather than fending off new innovative types of technologies, we’re embracing them,” Atkins stated during a recent CNBC interview.
