The decision, which current SEC officials stress is “not, in any legal or metaphysical sense, binding,” was apparently made after Atkins spent a weekend trying to explain the Howey Test to his nephew. “He just kept asking ‘why?’,” a visibly flustered Atkins told reporters he’d cornered in the men’s room. “Why is this a security? Why isn’t that? Pretty soon, I’m asking why. Why are we using rules from the 1930s for digital magic beans? It’s madness, Jerry, madness!”
WASHINGTON D.C. – In a move that has left economists, lawyers, and anyone who still owns a fax machine utterly bewildered, former SEC Commissioner Paul S. Atkins, a man who hasn’t worked at the agency since 2008, reportedly walked into SEC headquarters yesterday, demanded a visitor’s pass, and single-handedly dismissed every pending cryptocurrency lawsuit, including the legal epic of SEC v. Ripple.
“What’s the deal with all this paperwork?” Atkins was heard saying, gesturing vaguely at stacks of legal filings while sipping a lukewarm coffee he’d apparently brought from home. “It’s a whole thing! You sue them, they sue you. It’s like a bad sitcom. Nobody knows who’s supposed to be where, the laugh track is broken, and in the end, the mailman did it. Who needs it?”
The immediate fallout was catastrophic, primarily for the global financial system known as SWIFT, which, upon hearing the news, apparently suffered the digital equivalent of a massive, final, screeching dial-up modem failure.
A source inside the Belgian-based cooperative described the scene as “prett-ay, prett-ay bad.”
“The whole system just… stopped,” said the anonymous source, who was busy trying to jam a crumpled wad of Euros into a fax machine. “It turns out the entire global economy was running on the combined processing power of a Commodore 64 and the world’s collective anxiety over the XRP lawsuit. You take that anxiety away? The whole Jenga tower comes down. It’s a social construct, really. A very, very loud, inefficient social construct.”
Global markets reacted with the kind of calm, rational panic one expects. Bankers in Zurich were seen frantically trying to send wire instructions via carrier pigeon. Wall Street traders, stripped of their primary source of speculative drama, were seen listlessly throwing darts at a picture of a Shiba Inu.
In a press conference that felt more like an awkward dinner party, current SEC Chair Gary Gensler tried to clarify the situation. “Mr. Atkins is a private citizen,” Gensler stated, sweating profusely. “He has no authority. He can’t just… end things. That’s not how ending things works. There’s a process. You have to form a committee to discuss the possibility of maybe, someday, considering an end.”
Atkins, however, was undeterred. Reached for comment on his golf cart, he doubled down. “Look, they were just sitting on it. The holy grail! The big one! XRP! For years! It’s like saving a piece of cake in the fridge. You know you’re not gonna eat it, it’s just sitting there, judging you. I did them a favor. Now there’s room for more cake. Or, you know, innovation. Whatever.”
As the world scrambles to figure out how to send money without a system apparently designed by Alexander Graham Bell’s less ambitious brother, Paul S. Atkins has ushered in a new, confusing, and frankly anti-Orwellian era. An era where one man, armed with nothing but a visitor’s pass and a deep-seated annoyance with bureaucratic inertia, can look at the whole system and say, “No soup for you!”