SEC Looking For Contractor On Running Ethereum Nodes

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has announced plans to outsource its blockchain monitoring and compliance data.

According to Trustnodes, the SEC is allegedly planning to run a Bitcoin and an Ethereum node through contractors. They add that it also plans a similar thing for the blockchain of other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, NEO, XRP and more. 

The commission published a notice on the Federal Businesses Opportunities website, saying:

“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.”

Now there wasn’t a specific reason for these actions but the Commission did say that the move would help "support its efforts to monitor risk, improve compliance and inform Commission policy with respect to digital assets".

The SEC stated:

“The subscription shall source all blockchain data from hosted nodes, rather than providing this data as a secondary source.”

This data would include things like the hashing power, hashing algorithms and rewards, transaction quantity and size, coin supply and blockchain size. 

While a lot of data can be offered up by several blockchain explorers, it appeared the SEC is looking for a data provider that can also provide analysis. It was stated that the contractor must, “Demonstrate level of rigor of data cleansing and normalization meets requirements of financial statement audit testing.”

It’s still quite unclear as to why the lawmaker had a keen interest in the Bitcoin network as it has said on several occasions that the leading currency isn’t a security and acts more like it were a commodity and therefore doesn’t come under its regulatory oversight.

But maybe the information is needed from the activities on all blockchains in order to find out when a crypto asset is a security and when it isn’t.

Trustnodes conclude that:

“So the American regulator might perhaps finally be moving a bit, but it’s not clear whether their focus is more on enforcement or on facilitation of capital formation.”