ON HER WAY OUT OF THE SEC, HESTER PEIRCE PUT A THREE-PART TEST FOR A TRULY PERMISSIONLESS NETWORK INTO THE PUBLIC RECORD — AND SHE NEVER SAID THE WORD BITCOIN

Commissioner Hester Peirce spoke to SIFMA’s Digital Assets Conference in New York on September 23, 2026. The speech is called Looking for Change in Haystacks. On the surveillance system she said this: “The expense of running this system seems to dwarf its effectiveness at stopping bad actors.” On the alternative: “A zero-knowledge proof can tell a counterparty ‘Yes, this person meets your requirement’ without that counterparty knowing your name, income, or address.”

Then she did the thing that matters. She wrote down a test. “A network is truly permissionless when its core protocol operates through automated, immutable code rather than through the discretionary actions of an identifiable party, when there is no custodial intermediary standing between users and their assets, and when all participants and transactions are treated neutrally.”

Read that as three checks, because that is what it is. Is the protocol code or is it somebody’s decision. Is there a custodian between you and your coins. Does the network treat everyone the same. Anyone can run those checks against any system without asking its operator anything. That is a very different kind of standard from one that asks whether a firm filed the right form.

She never said bitcoin. She said “public blockchain networks typically produce permanent, public, auditable ledgers of every transaction that law enforcement can analyze.” But apply her three checks honestly to the products in that room and see how many survive. A definition written this precisely, by a sitting commissioner, weeks before she leaves the agency, is the kind of thing that outlives the person who wrote it. Her summary was four words: “Americans deserve both security and privacy.” At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $83,718.