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Today in crypto, SEC Chair Gary Gensler announced he will step down from his role in January, layer-1 blockchain Sui experienced a significant outage, which halted block production for more than an hour, and American commentator Avik Roy argued that a strategic Bitcoin reserve won’t solve the country’s $35 trillion debt problem.

Gary Gensler to step down from SEC in January

United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler has announced that he will relinquish his role on Jan. 20, 2025, the day President-elect Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office.

“It has been an honor of a lifetime to serve with them on behalf of everyday Americans and ensure that our capital markets remain the best in the world,” Gensler said in a statement, which was also posted by the SEC.

While campaigning for president, Trump vowed to “fire” Gensler if he won the Nov. 5 election. In the same vein, Trump promised to make America “the crypto capital of the world” if he secured the Oval Office. 

Gensler, who is well known for his anti-crypto stance, likely saw the writing on the wall and decided to leave on his own volition. 

Gensler recently doubled down on his aggressive stance toward digital assets, saying he wanted to compel the roughly 10,000 tokens he considers securities to “register and give proper disclosure to the public.”

Sui Network restored after 2-hour outage in setback for “Solana killer”

The Sui blockchain went down on Nov. 21, with no blocks being produced for more than an hour, according to data from the Sui Network explorer, SuiVision.

According to the data, the last block occurred at 9:15 am UTC, with no new blocks produced afterward.

Multiple industry observers reacted to the downtime, with many outlining Sui’s ambitions to be one of the biggest competitors to Solana SOL$257.43, which is the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

“SUI blockchain is down. And they claimed to be a Solana Killer,” crypto YouTuber Ajay Kashyap wrote on X.

The downtime also impacted Sui SUI$3.53, the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency, which fell nearly 11%, according to data from CoinGecko. Still, it was trading at about $3.40 and was still up around 75% over the past 30 days.

The Sui Foundation took to X to announce the outage about two hours following the block production halt, stating that the network is currently experiencing an outage and not processing transactions.

“We’ve identified the issue, and a fix will be deployed shortly,” the foundation noted.

After a two-hour outage, the Sui Foundation took to X to announce that Sui is back up and processing transactions again “thanks to swift work from the incredible community of Sui validators.”

According to the foundation, the downtime was caused by a bug in transaction scheduling logic that caused validators to crash, which has now been resolved.

Bitcoin reserve won’t solve US debt crisis: Think tank co-founder

United States Senator Cynthia Lummis’ plan to set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve won’t be enough to solve the country’s debt crisis, which has now swelled to $35 trillion, says the president of the nonprofit think tank.

“When Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming talks about how a Bitcoin reserve could help us eliminate the federal debt, that’s an overselling of what Bitcoin could do,” Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity said on stage at the North American Blockchain Summit 2024 in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 20.

A scenario where the US buys an “enormous” amount of Bitcoin BTC$98,649 that appreciates could help, Roy said, but it won’t catch the $35.46 trillion debt that has been rising nearly exponentially since the 1980s.

“The Bitcoin reserve is good, but it does not solve the problem, you still have to actually do the budgetary reforms to get us out of this $2 trillion a year of federal deficits.”