NFT Regulatory Thaw?

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With a new incoming presidential administration, Biden's SEC chair Gary Gensler is likely on the way out at the SEC.

Arguably no public official has ever been as widely disdained in crypto as Gensler, who seemingly took the most aggressive and unforgiving positions possible against token projects during his tenure.

More than a few of these projects, of course, were NFT-centric. For example, the Commission recently issued Wells Notices to OpenSea and Immutable. Gensler's SEC also charged Impact Theory, Stoner Cats, and Flyfish Club with unregistered securities sales via NFTs.

This hostile environment has been lambasted by dissenting SEC commissioners like Hester Peirce on multiple occasions (1, 2, 3, etc.). It's also led to artists suing the Commission for clarity on whether digital artworks sold via NFTs are securities.

Now there's the chance to turn the page upon Gensler's departure, but what would this look like?

It remains to be seen who will become the new SEC chair. Early reports suggest Dan Gallagher, a former SEC commissioner and the current chief legal officer of Robinhood, is in the mix. Whoever gets the nod, we can presume they'll be much friendlier to crypto and NFTs than Gensler was.

That said, the new SEC chair won't have unilateral power to fix all the regulatory woes around digital assets in the U.S. That will likely require Congress passing multiple pieces of legislation. But they will be able to set agency enforcement priorities, like deprioritizing token cases.

In the meantime, we lack specifics. We don't know who the SEC chair will be, we don't know what crypto legislation Congress might propose, and we don't know what pace to expect here.

There's also the scenario in which Gensler refuses to resign and, thanks to the SEC's independence, his departure drags on for months or longer with a protracted legal battle. That's another possibility that complicates predictions here.

In any case, what most people are expecting next is a fast regulatory thaw around crypto and NFTs. We'll have to wait and see if the new powers that be deliver on these expectations, or if the action is slow here amid non-crypto issues being more prioritized. Only time will tell for now.

📰 General news

• Magic Eden is publishing its $ME tokenomics on Nov. 18th
• OpenSea unveiled a waitlist for its V2 platform
• PleasrDAO is playing its completed White Rabbit webseries at Devcon
  

🎨 Cryptoart & music

• 0xfff.eth announced World Computer Sculpture Garden, a smart contract art show on Ethereum
• BasePaint brought its themes onchain
• BottoDAO is SuperRare's Rare Collection curator for November 2024
• TITLES released its new explore page for artist AI models

🏆 Digital collectibles

• Chonks, the upcoming ERC-6551 NFT collection, launched its website
• Magic Eden implemented its Mempool Protection feature for Ordinals traders

🎮 Decentralized gaming

• Parallel Colony released its latest development update
• Pirate Nation is preparing to start Season 3 gameplay

🪙 Memes & NFTfi 

• GONDI published an NFT Lending Market dashboard on Dune
• Zoo.fun, a new memecoin launcher platform, is deploying on Abstract
• Zora released Wow, a platform for trading ERC-20z memecoins

📱 Onchain social

• Rodeo, a crypto social network, is now usable with just an email

🌐 Virtual worlds

• Decentraland is coming to the Epic Games Store

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What I'm Reading

• 😎 Shorts and Longs - Nounsletter
• 🎨 The Creators Economy - Boffin
• 📱 Farcaster's Growing Agentic Economy - YB
• ⛓️ I Paid $2,699.79 to Put My NFT Onchain - Nahiko