Policy Punchline

What are the SEC enforcement stories behind major cases of fraud such as the Fyre Festival and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, or famous settlements such as with Elon Musk and Wells Fargo? Stephanie Avakian is the Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. She has worked on some of the most complex and intriguing investigations, settlements, and financial regulations in recent years. 
In this interview, we discuss how the SEC and the greater financial regulatory community handle complex fraud cases while putting forth policy innovations for the fintech space. We first touch on the technical aspects for judging when a virtual currency is a security and when it’s not. It has been a poignant point of debate whether the SEC should treat cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as financial securities and thus directly regulate them. It has also become more and more difficult to regulate the cyber space at large, such as when celebrities from DJ Khalid to Floyd Mayweather touted cryptocurrencies on social media. It