The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (US SEC) are looking for contractors that are willing to run Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP nodes on their behalf. The SEC have stated that these nodes will help them monitor the risks and improve compliance even though there are free block explorers and other analytic tools available online.
The SEC: Dipping its Toes in Blockchain Nodes
The Securities Exchange Commission are famous for their attempts at regulating the crypto market and their tries at policing the whole blockchain sphere earned distrust from the community as a whole.
According to Trustnodes, the SEC are making plans for running their own Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes and additionally to have as many more possible active on other networks like Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, EOS, NEO, XRP etc. The agency stated that running such nodes on the blockchain networks will be beneficial towards their efforts to monitor risk, compliance and even created new, better-informed policies. The official FBO (Federal Business Opportunities) website also states that all blockchain data from hosted nodes will be sourced, rather than providing its own data as a secondary source. Also, data like hashing algorithms, hashing power, mining difficulty, rewards, transactional information, coin supply, blockchain size etc will be tracked and analyzed by the SEC.
What is the End Goal of SEC?
Since the news of the Security Exchange Commission’s plans to dive deep into the blockchain world were out, there have been very mixed feedback by the community and of course an understandable amount of distrust.
Some parts of the community believe that this is a step forward for the blockchain technology because this may mean that the US Government will finally accept crypto as an industry and give it the recognition it deserves. Other parts of the community are not so positive thinking and more skeptical regarding the whole situation beg to differ. They think that surveillance and regulation from the government beats the whole purpose the technology became popular in the first place. The goal was to create means of transaction of information or assets without a third party like a bank or government interfering.
It is yet impossible to determine what the end game for SEC might be with the moves they are making in the blockchain community. It is no wonder that such redistribution of large resources on the side of SEC towards their entrance in the blockchain world would raise suspicion and distrust.