SEC Chair Gary Gensler says investors lack needed crypto disclosures following multiple Wells Notices

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler says investors are not getting vital crypto disclosures after the agency handed out notices to multiple crypto entities that it plans to bring enforcement actions against. 

Gensler was asked Tuesday morning on CNBC Squawk Box about the agency's recent move to file a Wells Notice against Robinhood Crypto, the crypto unit of the brokerage firm Robinhood Markets. The exchange said on Monday that SEC staff had decided to recommend an enforcement action against the crypto unit, alleging securities violations.

Gensler said he couldn't speak to any one company. 

"Stepping back from it — the field of crypto assets — without prejudging any one of them, many of those tokens are securities under the law of the land, as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court," Gensler said on CNBC. "So we follow that law, and you, the investors, are not getting the required or needed disclosures about those assets." 

Robinhood's Wells Notice is one of a handful filed against crypto entities over the past month. Consensys, the crypto firm behind MetaMask Wallet, and decentralized crypto exchange Uniswap have said they also received Wells Notices from the SEC last month. The SEC is also battling it out in court with crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase.

So… is ether a security or a commodity?

Gensler didn't directly say how ether would be classified when asked by CNBC whether it could be a security or a commodity. 

"All I would say is, to me, the fundamental question is how do we ensure that the American investor is protected?" Gensler said. "Right now, they're not getting the required or needed disclosures, and the intermediaries in the center of this rather centralized market generally are conflicted and doing things we would never allow the New York Stock Exchange to do."

The SEC has not explicitly said whether ether is a security, while Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam has asserted that it is a commodity. Multiple issuers are also vying for a spot ether ETF, though those have been met with delays over the past several weeks and optimism has since dwindled that one could be approved by a end of May deadline. 

Gensler told CNBC that the matter is in front of the commission.