SEC Chair Atkins Grilled by Congress Over 60% Crypto Enforcement Decline

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins defended a dramatic shift in the agency’s crypto enforcement strategy during a House Financial Services Committee oversight hearing, addressing a reported 60% decline in new lawsuits since he took office in April 2025. Democratic lawmakers demanded explanations for the agency’s withdrawal from or pause of more than a dozen high-profile crypto cases, including actions involving Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Justin Sun’s Tron Foundation.

Representative Maxine Waters focused on the SEC’s February 2025 decision to request a stay in the enforcement case against Tron Foundation founder Justin Sun to “explore a potential resolution”—a pause that has remained in effect for over a year with no settlement or resumption announced. The SEC originally charged Sun and his entities in March 2023 with unregistered securities offerings, fraud via over 600,000 instances of wash trading to inflate trading volume, and undisclosed celebrity promotions. Waters told Atkins: “While you were exploring a potential resolution, Mr. Sun has been busy ingratiating himself within Trump’s orbit,” referencing Sun’s ties to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial venture.

Atkins told lawmakers he cannot discuss the paused Sun case but agreed to consider a confidential briefing. When asked by another Democratic lawmaker whether his agency ever protects investors at a cost to Trump’s businesses, Atkins responded, “As far as what the Trump family does or not, I can’t speak to that.” The agency has dropped high-profile enforcement matters against Binance, Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood, with monetary penalties against digital asset participants falling to $142 million in 2025—less than 3% of 2024 levels, a figure independently confirmed in Cornerstone Research’s SEC Cryptocurrency Enforcement: 2025 Update (2026-01-22).

Sourcing note (2026-08-28): the hearing coverage as originally recorded here also asserted that “approximately 60% of crypto-related enforcement actions have been dismissed or paused since Atkins took office, compared to only 4% of non-crypto enforcement matters during the same period.” A verification pass could locate no study, report, or primary document supporting that pairing — not Cornerstone Research’s report (which measures a 60% year-over-year decline in new crypto filings, 33→13, not a dismissal rate; of 29 crypto actions resolved in 2025, 7 were dismissed under Atkins), not the NYT’s 2025-12-14 analysis (inaccessible for direct verification), and not the House Judiciary Democrats staff report (fetched and text-searched directly; contains no such figure). The 60%/4% differential is retired corpus-wide as unsourced. It is left visible here, struck through in effect by this note, as the traceable origin point of the claim in the corpus rather than deleted outright, since this entry is itself the primary record of what the hearing coverage said — accurately or not.