The Reserve Rights (RSR) token saw a sharp increase in value as speculation built around former United States President Donald Trump’s expected nomination of a new US Securities and Exchange Commission chair.
Some members of the cryptocurrency community have linked the token’s rise to rumors that Trump may appoint former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins, who has previously advised the Reserve Rights Foundation, the entity behind the RSR token.
Atkins, who has emerged as the leading candidate for SEC chair in the past week, has indeed advised Reserve, though not actively at the moment, according to Reserve co-creator and CEO Nevin Freeman.
Atkins is “not actively consulting on Reserve and was only an advisor back at the beginning of the project,” Freeman said in a Nov. 2 X post on Nov. 28.
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“But in our interactions, I was impressed by his open-mindedness, and the fact that he was cool with his Reserve advisors being publicized shows he was very willing to lean in on crypto,” he added.
Atkins has been “open to working with crypto clients” since 2017
According to Reserve’s Freeman, Atkins has been “open to working with crypto clients in his consultancy” since 2017.
“I believe he would take a principled approach, and I’d be very excited to work with him and his team on productive rulemaking,” he said.
Some prominent crypto figures, including pro-crypto attorney John Deaton, have also expressed support for Atkins as the future SEC chair.
“Paul Atkins is a solid choice, no doubt. As long as it’s not Stebbins. I’ve heard very good things about Atkins,” Deaton wrote on X on Nov. 21.
Reserve’s RSR rallies 88% on the new SEC chair anticipation
While Trump has chosen some cabinet and administration officials the president-elect is yet to appoint a new SEC chair to replace Gary Gensler, who announced his upcoming departure in November.
On Dec. 2, Fox News reporter Eleanor Terrett said that Trump will likely announce the new SEC chair as soon as “tomorrow.”
With Atkins leading industry betting as the likely next SEC chair on platforms like Kalshi, RSR has been rallying, given his involvement in Reserve.
On Dec. 3, the RSR token jumped as high as 88%, surging to a multiyear high of $0.017, according to data from CoinGecko. Despite the rally, the RSR token is still 551% far from its all-time high of $0.11 recorded in April 2021.
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