Today, the SEC appears to have continued their ongoing crusade to protect terrorist funding and large bank monopolies at the expense of the American consumer, innocent civilians in warzones, and technology that was created after the year 1940. I want to be clear that I'm not anti-regulator in saying this. Quite the reverse, actually! I have a lot of respect for the work of the Federal Reserve, the NYDFS, the JFSA, the CFTC, and others. Are they perfect? No, nobody is. Are they more of a positive force than most people who complain about regulators want to admit? With almost 100% certainty. I've had my differences with the OCC and FDIC on crypto regulations in particular, but I think in their case it's driven by a lack of understanding and the natural paranoia they have for the stability of the US banking system. Thus, even when I disagree, I'm usually not of the belief that their actions are motivated by malice, but rather lack of information and understanding that will be remedied over time as they get up to speed on things. I've also written several times about what an unenviable job most US financial regulators have and how we should appreciate them more. Then there is the SEC. To recap briefly on the history of the SEC, they have somehow managed to sue Ripple and Coinbase, then send Wells Notices to people like Paxos on products that are already regulated by a banking regulator. They've also destroyed LBRY, one of the few functioning crypto projects from the early boom which wasn't defrauding anyone, and they inexplicably shut down Stoner Cats. Do you notice what is not on that list? FTX. Celsius. Terraform Labs. Hex. SafeMoon. BlockFi. The list goes on. Basically, if you were an actual scam or criminal activity, you were 100% safe from the SEC and they were, in fact, going to go out of their way to assist you by attempting to cripple your legitimate competitors instead. There is a very strong argument that if the SEC simply did not exist and had been replaced with literally nothing, far less consumers would have been harmed in crypto. This brings me to today, where we find out the SEC, in response to all of the concerns being raised about terrorism financing, the still-ongoing issues Justin Sun-affiliated projects like TUSD, USDD, and Tron, and the increasing offshoring of all KYC/AML data due to projects leaving the United States, the SEC has decided to attempt to intimidate and investigate... PayPal? You can't make this shit up. PYUSD is transparently a stored value project under the NYDFS stablecoin guidance. Being incredibly blunt here, as someone with deep knowledge of the inner workings, if PYUSD is a security, so are Starbucks gift cards, prepaid debit cards, and airline reward points. This thing fails Howey so spectacularly it would be laughed out of court by a judge. It's also safer for consumers than standard PayPal e-money because it's bankruptcy remote. This is strictly better in all ways. And yet, in a target rich environment, the SEC continues to avoid going after anyone actually doing wrong and instead continue to target legitimate companies helping consumers in a way that is guaranteed to damage American security interests and push the space offshore in a way that makes it more viable for terrorists and criminals to use crypto because we slowly lose the tools to interdict them. Put differently: if Gary Gensler has been bribed by crypto scammers, organized crime, and Hamas, and was trying to help them while not tipping his hand, what would he be doing differently?