SEC’s Peirce Says Publishing DeFi Code Shouldn’t Fall Under Securities Laws
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US Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce said software developers should not be subject to federal securities laws simply for distributing open-source code.
At Princeton University’s IC3 Blockchain Camp on June 4, Peirce said developers who publish blockchain and decentralized finance, or DeFi, code should not be treated as securities brokers, Cointelegraph reported.
Many blockchain projects involve the publication of open-source software, an activity that is generally protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, she said. Because decentralized protocols can operate without traditional intermediaries, responsibility for securities-law violations should lie with the individuals who actually engage in illegal conduct, rather than with the people who wrote the software.
Peirce said the SEC’s rulebook is largely built around regulating intermediaries, including brokers, dealers, exchanges, clearing agencies, transfer agents and investment advisers. As a result, the digital-asset industry has also been pushed into that framework.
She also questioned whether those rules should be extended to blockchain infrastructure itself, adding that distributed networks are used for far more than securities transactions alone.
