Photo: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Former SEC chair Gensler calls Bitcoin the only crypto resembling a commodity
In a Bloomberg TV interview, Gary Gensler drew a sharp line between Bitcoin and thousands of other tokens he described as speculative with no underlying fundamentals.
Gary Gensler spent four years as SEC chair making crypto’s life difficult. Now out of office, he is making something else clear: of the thousands of digital tokens in existence, he thinks exactly one has a legitimate claim to lasting value.
In a December 2025 interview with Bloomberg TV, Gensler singled out Bitcoin as the only cryptocurrency that meaningfully resembles a commodity, pointing to its decentralized structure and global recognition as the qualities that set it apart. Everything else, he argued, is essentially a bet on price movement rather than an investment grounded in economic substance.
What Gensler actually said
His core argument is straightforward: most tokens offer no dividends, no cash flows, and no underlying business generating returns.
Gensler carved out one partial exception alongside Bitcoin, acknowledging dollar-backed stablecoins as a distinct category. But for the broader market of altcoins, his verdict was blunt. Thousands of tokens, in his view, are sustained by the expectation that someone will pay more for them later.
Bitcoin was trading near $92,000 at the time of the interview.
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Gensler has consistently maintained he does not own Bitcoin or any other digital asset.
A position consistent with his entire tenure
During his time leading the SEC from 2021 through January 2025, Gensler repeatedly argued that Bitcoin stood apart from other crypto assets under securities law. His agency pursued enforcement actions against a wide range of crypto projects and exchanges, treating many tokens as unregistered securities. Bitcoin, operating without a central issuer or identifiable promoter, was the consistent outlier in that framework.
The approval of Bitcoin futures ETFs during his tenure reinforced the same logic in practice. The SEC’s willingness to greenlight those products signaled something meaningful about how regulators classified Bitcoin relative to everything else.
His commodity framing aligns with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s long-standing position that Bitcoin is a commodity, a classification that carries significant legal and regulatory implications. Commodities sit under a different regulatory roof than securities, with different disclosure requirements and investor protection frameworks.