Welcome to the Forward Guidance newsletter, brought to you by Casey Wagner and Ben Strack. Here’s what you’ll find in today’s edition:

• Getting to know the man Donald Trump wants to chair the SEC. 

• A look at Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s warning to law firms.

• Casey breaks down what to make of October’s JOLTS report.

Gensler’s potential replacement named

After 16 years, Paul Atkins may be returning to the SEC. 

President-elect Donald Trump this afternoon officially named Atkins as his pick to chair the SEC. Atkins worked with SEC Chairs Richard C. Breeden and Arthur Levitt in the 1990s as chief of staff and counselor, respectively. He later served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008, beginning his term shortly after Enron’s accounting fraud scandal and leaving a month before Lehman Brothers collapsed. 

Since then, Atkins has worked as the CEO of his consulting firm, Patomak Global Partners. Its clients include banks, crypto companies and securities markets participants. 

Atkins is no stranger to Washington, or to the nomination process. It only takes a simple majority to confirm cabinet nominations, and with Republicans holding 53 Senate seats, Atkins should be a shoo-in. 

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Atkins faced some tough questions (likely mostly from Democrats) during his confirmation hearings about his private sector business interests — particularly those related to crypto. 

Why? Let’s rewind to 2022. 

Two years ago, thanks to a successful FOIA request from nonprofit whistleblower Empower Oversight, hundreds of emails between top SEC officials were released. Ripple, which at this point was about 16 months into its lawsuit with the SEC over the status of its XRP token, found these correspondences especially interesting. 

The emails, dated from May 2017 to December 2020, revealed that SEC officials were divided on which tokens violated securities laws, and which issuers should therefore be the targets of enforcement actions. They also highlighted a potential conflict of interest involving William Hinman, who served as director of the SEC’s division of corporation finance from May 2017 to December 2020.

Hinman was prohibited from engaging in SEC matters that could impact his former employer, law firm Simpson Thatcher, in which Hinman still held a financial interest while he worked at the SEC. Simpson Thatcher had a financial interest in Ethereum, which was (and has been since) spared from an SEC enforcement action. 

I covered all of this in much more detail for Blockworks back in 2022. But the bottom line is these emails were embarrassing for the SEC, which fought to have them sealed in its case against Ripple. The documents ultimately brought context and transparency to the lawsuit, and while they weren’t enough to toss the case entirely, they did help Ripple secure its partial win in the summary judgment. 

So, given this history, I’d imagine certain senators — many of whom have advocated against perceived “pro-crypto” legislation in the past — will be interested to learn more about which companies Atkins has been involved with and what, if any, his financial exposure is. 

We’re months out from confirmation hearings, though. And Atkins has yet to make a public statement regarding his nomination (he also has not responded to Blockworks’ request for comment), so there is much more information to come. We’ll be following along closely.

— Casey Wagner

The number of fund firms, by our count, that have so far formalized plans to launch a spot solana ETF in the US.

Grayscale Investments became the latest, as indicated by a Tuesday filing by NYSE. VanEck filed for a spot SOL offering in June. 21Shares, Canary Capital and Bitwise followed suit.   

Different from others, Grayscale would be converting an existing fund — its Solana Trust, which has shares trading on OTC markets and manages roughly $120 million in assets.

When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong speaks, the crypto industry tends to listen.

His recent X post reminded me of what Twisted Sister first sang out in 1984: “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” (I would only hear this years later, after my birth). 

If you didn’t see, here’s the post:

You see that Armstrong called out the hire of Gurbir Grewal, who had been the SEC’s enforcement division director since 2021. He departed the agency in October and later that month joined the litigation and arbitration group at Milbank LLP.

The law firm stated in a news release that the commission brought more than 2,400 enforcement actions during Grewal’s tenure, including “more than 100 enforcement actions addressing noncompliance in the crypto space.” 

A Milbank spokesperson did not return my request for comment. 

Despite what the X post might suggest, a person familiar with the matter clarified that Milbank has never actually worked for Coinbase.  

You might remember too that McGuireWoods in August hired David Hirsch, ex-head of the SEC’s crypto assets and cyber unit. Coinbase’s relationship with that firm is unclear, and a McGuireWoods representative didn’t immediately comment. 

Armstrong’s post was meant to spark conversation and give some transparency about how the publicly traded crypto exchange is thinking about this.

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal told me that not all law firm leaders keep close tabs on crypto and might not understand how “deeply personal” the SEC’s enforcement actions felt to industry players. 

“This was more than just, we have a good-faith disagreement about the law, so let’s resolve this in an amicable way,” he said. “It has felt for three and a half years that this industry has been under attack [and] unfairly attacked.”

Of course, companies can hire whoever they want. But the point is that so too can Coinbase (and others) choose who it works with.

Armstrong’s post “did catch people’s attention in the big law world,” Grewal noted. We’ll see if it moves the needle at all in terms of who firms choose to hire. Either way, the message was sent.

— Ben Strack

The big week for jobs data kicked off yesterday with the October JOLTS report coming in better than expected. The survey showed 7.74 million job openings for the month of October, compared to analyst estimates of 7.51 million. 

Treasurys, in response, dipped, bringing the 10-year yield back into the 4.2% zone on Tuesday. Yields on 10-year notes were hovering around 4.19% at 2 pm ET Wednesday. The moves can largely be attributed to renewed certainty that the Fed will cut interest rates by 25 basis points later this month. Fed funds futures markets were pricing in a 75% chance of such a cut Tuesday afternoon, according to CME Group data. 

Gold lost momentum on Tuesday’s JOLTS figures, but futures prices still managed to end yesterday’s session 0.4% higher. Spot gold prices were also in the green at time of publication, up 0.4% over 24 hours as of 2 pm ET. 

Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday afternoon reiterated that the central bank is going to be “cautious” on rate cuts. Speaking at the DealBook Summit, he added there are many unknowns associated with Donald Trump’s second term, and the Fed cannot and will not make policy based on the “prospect” of tariffs.

The headline report this week is still the November jobs report, to be released Friday morning. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition where we’ll preview the report.

— Casey Wagner

• Bitcoin saw a slight bump Wednesday, sitting above $96,600 shortly after 2 pm ET — up about 0.7% from a day ago. Ether’s price was up even more, soaring 6% over the last 24 hours to about $3,830 around that time. 

• A report by CF Benchmarks found that Ethereum blockchain activity has surged recently. Its CFB Smart Contract index saw the single largest increase (83.3% gains in November), while ETH total fee revenue climbed 46.3%. CME ETH futures open interest grew 70% month over month, the company added.

• Bitcoin miner Hut 8 revealed a controlled equity offering sales agreement with an aggregate offering price of up to $500 million. The company intends to use net proceeds for “the acquisition or development of power and digital infrastructure assets such as data centers, as well as the purchase of bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset,” Hut 8 said in a news release.