More Control or More Freedom? SEC to Run BTC, ETH, XRP nodes; Inviting Contractors

Contractors for running Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) nodes are required. This notice was announced by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) The SEC wants to run its own nodes on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The chosen contractors will need to run the nodes on behalf of the SEC. Surprisingly, SEC’s announcement was made on 2nd July but went unnoticed.

As of now, the SEC has not opened up on what it will do with the data it will collect from its contractors. It is a thing to ponder about that in the presence of so many blockchain explorers, why is the SEC still looking for external contractors to do the work on its behalf? One reason can be to get more detailed, analytical information from the contractors, but is it really all about it? The coin is still flipping in the air. Where will it rest?

Will this situation bring appositive outcome or push us into a new form of government control; it is yet to be revealed.

As per the official announcement, the SEC said,

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 100 F Street, NE, Washington, DC 20549, intends to procure a commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) enterprise-wide data subscription for blockchain ledger data to support its efforts to monitor risk, improve compliance, and inform Commission policy with respect to digital assets.

Why does the SEC want to regulate the nodes?

Well, as per the SEC, regulation of the nodes will help in closely monitoring the following-
• Risks involved,
• Compliance should improve many folds.

The overall quality of the blockchain compliance should improve even though there are many blockchain explorers are active online.

Lately, it has been seen that the SEC has been trying several ways to regulate the crypt sphere. The community is tilting towards distrusting the authority as soon as the news of its latest attempt to regulate the market by running its own nodes for Bitcoin and Ethereum, surfaced.

Nodes, and conditions for offers laid by the SEC

The regulatory authority not only wants to run nodes for Bitcoin and Ethereum, but it also intends to cover as many nodes as possible, according to a source. The source revealed that SEC is planning to look into the following blockchain ledgers

• Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
• Stellar (XLM)
• ZCash (ZEC)
• EOS (EOS)
• NEO (NEO)
• Ripple (XRP)

Further SEC revealed a few conditions. They are-
• The regulatory authority will only accept applications from those companies which have COTS (COTS stands for Commercially Available Off-the-Shelf).
• SEC has also provided a requirement list that every applicant company needs to adhere to.
• The applicants should be clear that the requirement is not in the area of any kind of development of a new solution, or any kind of customization of a product.
• The applicant companies are required to have an active registration in the ‘System for Award Management.’ This registration should stay alive until the submission deadline of the RFQ.

The SEC is expecting that running their nodes would make the monitoring process much more effective as things such as ‘hashing algorithms, hashing power, mining difficulty and rewards, transaction quantity and size, coin supply, and blockchain size’ could be managed well. It has been clearly mentioned that the blockchain data should be sourced from hosted nodes, and not as a ‘secondary source.’

What is the objective of collecting the data?

SEC’s move has got a mixed response from the community. Some think it is a ‘bullish sign.’ Some are predicting that the move may lead to further acceptance of crypto industry both by the regulatory body and from the U.S. government. Some market experts are seeing this move in a very positive light. For instance, senior market analyst at eToro, Mati Greenspan said that ‘he never thought he’d see the day when the government got this involved in blockchain.’

There is another percentage of the community who feels that this move may not be as positive as it appears to be. Their reasoning lies in the fact that anyone monitoring the movement on the ledger is very much against the grain of free spirit (decentralized nature) of cryptocurrency and the related technology. This percentage of the community thinks that there can be serious issues in the sector of privacy if the government monitors the crypto transactions on the ledger.