> Although, oddly, he's never done a crypto transaction.

As Matt Levine wrote on his newsletter, saying that the SEC must have traded crypto to regulate it is like saying the DEA should have used meth to regulate meth -- if you think the thing is bad, then obviously you should understand it, then ban it, without using it yourself.

Now, people can disagree whether the thing is bad, but it would be foolish to assume that the SEC doesn't know how cryptocurrency works. If you look at the career paths and previous work of most of the top bureaucrats at the SEC, you'll see that they were usually involved in a great deal of legislation or had prominent positions in industry doing real projects.

I think you may misunderstand the level or type of research that is involved in answering this question. It's mostly not about cryptocurrency: understanding that is the easy part of answering this question. The real research that needed to be done is on the law, and it is much more complicated and convoluted, and can result in unclear answers until someone gets sued and a court is forced to decide one way or the other.