Gensler's personality started to be recalled again in the blockchain community after Republican Donald Trump won the US presidential election. One of the politician's promises was to change the SEC leadership. And he promised to do it on his first day in office if he won the election.

Newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump in a Pubkey bar

As previous years have shown, SEC chairmen have usually resigned during the inauguration of a newly elected president. Accordingly, by doing so, they technically avoided being fired and vacated the position on their own.

What will happen to Gary Gensler?

Gary Gensler has been chairman of the SEC since April 2021. He was appointed to the position by President Joe Biden and has become known for his initiatives in regulating financial markets – including digital assets.

Gensler was born on 18 October 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a B.A. and an M.B.A. in economics and finance. Gary then spent more than eighteen years at Goldman Sachs Investment Bank, holding senior management positions.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler

Since 2009, Gensler has been a high-ranking public servant – at that time he became the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Gary served in this position until 2014 and then worked to regulate derivatives markets and implement related reforms.

Also in Gensler’s bio are statements about his academic activities – including those directly related to the crypto industry. He has taught courses on blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and financial technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

During a hearing before Congressmen in April 2023, Gary admitted that he had never owned or interacted with cryptocurrencies. Consequently, there were serious questions about Gensler's courses, because talking about what's happening in blockchain and not using cryptocurrencies is a strange decision.

However, back then, Gensler was more loyal in his statements and did not refer to crypto as unregistered securities. This is exactly the kind of language he started to use much more often as the head of the SEC.

Gary Gensler during his lectures on blockchain at MIT

Since his appointment as Chairman of the Commission, Gensler has been focused on tightening regulation of the crypto market. Often this has been reduced to trivialising compliance with regulator demands through threats of legal action. This approach has been called regulation by coercion, which accurately describes the SEC’s approach.

The regulator is still suing some of the largest companies in the industry – previously it filed lawsuits against Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and many other corporate players in the industry. Moreover, Kraken previously agreed to pay a $30 million fine to settle the dispute without litigation and closed the steaking option for U.S. citizens at the request of the SEC. However, that didn’t stop the regulator from filing another lawsuit against the same platform six months later.

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Winklevoss is confident that Gensler’s actions should be judged on the facts. Here is his tweet, published by journalists from the Cointelegraph publication.

Let’s get one thing straight. Gary Gensler is evil. He should never hold an influential or responsible position ever again. Any company, university or organisation that hires him or works with him after the SEC is betraying the crypto industry and should be aggressively boycotted. This is the only way to prevent this abuse of government power from happening again in the future.

Gary Gensler on The Simpsons

According to Winklevoss, the result of the SEC chief’s actions is not only the fall in cryptocurrency rates, but also the huge collateral damage. He continues.

Gensler’s behaviour cannot be attributed to a bona fide mistake. It was entirely deliberate, premeditated and purposeful in order to pursue his personal political agenda at all costs. Even if it meant destroying an industry, tens of thousands of jobs, people’s livelihoods, billions in invested capital and much more. Ironically, his sociopathic ambition led him to burn down his own political party.


Note that this is not the first criticism of Gary Gensler's actions by representatives of American crypto exchanges. For example, in October 2024, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that any successor to the current head of the SEC would be obliged to apologise to the American people for what has been happening to the crypto niche over the past four years.


Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange chief Brian Armstrong

Gensler was appointed by Democratic President Biden, so his actions were largely associated with the stance of the US Democratic Party. This, among other things, played a cruel joke on politicians, as many American crypto users predominantly voted in favour of Republican promises, turning against Democrats. Therefore, the damage from Gary Gensler’s policies may be even greater than many realise.


Gary Gensler will go down in history as the head of the SEC who fought one of the most modern and promising industries in the world. And judging by the popularity of the coins and even talks by the new US authorities about Bitcoin possibly becoming a reserve asset for the country, Gensler's efforts turned out to be pointless and not needed by anyone.


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