During a speech last week, Hester Peirce, Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), elaborated on the potential of a cross border tokenization sandbox involving the UK and US. She first floated the idea more than a year ago in response to a UK consultation on the Digital Securities Sandbox. She outlined an important ground rule – that any cross border sandbox needs to focus on finance, not politics.
While the initial aim is to explore a US-UK sandbox, the Commissioner envisions collaborating with other like-minded countries. Those would include nations where market participants can respond freely to market incentives. As she put it, they should not serve as “robotic mercenaries in a government-orchestrated initiative to achieve objectives unrelated to investor protection, efficiency, competition and capital formation.”
Rather than leaving anyone questioning which nations she was referring to, she highlighted the EU’s double materiality in corporate reporting – the second materiality being sustainability. Plus, she’s not too keen on the “export of its sustainability disclosure requirements.”
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