U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman urges privacy-preserving crypto compliance and cites scaling back sensitive Consolidated Audit Trail data

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul S. Atkins delivered remarks at the Crypto Task Force roundtable on financial surveillance and privacy, arguing that participation in modern finance should not require surrendering personal privacy while still meeting national security and illicit-finance objectives. Speaking in his personal capacity, he criticised the expansion of government data collection through market surveillance tools and said the SEC has taken steps to scale back some of the Consolidated Audit Trail’s most sensitive data elements while re-examining its scope and cost. Atkins warned that public blockchains’ transparency, combined with increasingly capable chain analytics, could turn crypto into an unprecedented financial surveillance architecture if regulators treat every wallet, transaction, and protocol as a reporting or monitoring node. He pointed to privacy-enhancing technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, selective disclosure, and wallet designs that could enable compliance verification without exposing full financial histories, and argued that complete real-time transparency could also impair market functioning by facilitating front-running, copycat trading, and other adverse dynamics. The remarks also referenced the Bank Secrecy Act framework and cited the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets’ call for regulatory certainty and civil liberties protections in the context of public blockchains.