Former SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins testified in a confirmation hearing beside Trump's OCC nominee, Jonathan Gould, though crypto wasn't a central topic.

Paul Atkins, the former member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that President Donald Trump has tapped to run the agency, assured a different direction for the agency on crypto from the last four years, though he wasn't pressed with big-picture digital assets questions during a Thursday confirmation hearing.

Now that Trump has secured the cabinet-level echelon of his government, the White House is working on shepherding top agency chiefs through the Senate confirmation process. While many of the crypto headlines are coming from the administration and Congress these days, those running the regulatory agencies will ultimately be the ones writing the regulations the industry will have to conform with.

Atkins is seeking to be the successor of ex-Chair Gary Gensler, whose years at the agency established him as the digital assets sector's most prominent nemesis. But Trump's nominee is already positioning himself in stark contrast to Gensler, who criticized the industry's history with swindlers and contended that current securities law was sufficient to treat much of the space as if it were in active violation of registration requirements.

"A top priority of my chairmanship will be to work with my fellow commissioners and Congress to provide a firm regulatory foundation for digital assets through a rational, coherent, and principled approach," Atkins said in his prepared testimony for Thursday.

Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the committee, said Atkins will "provide long-overdue clarity for digital assets."

But even before the hearing began, Atkins was being slammed by Senator Elizabether Warren, the Massachusetts lawmaker who is the committee's ranking Democrat, who registered doubt about his ability to be impartial to the digital assets sector he's served as an adviser.

At the hearing table beside Atkins, Gould made his case for taking over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator for national banks. The OCC has been a significant player in the digital assets sector's campaign against U.S. banking oversight that's pressured banks to keep the industry at an arm's length. Crypto firms and insiders have struggled to maintain banking relationships and have argued that the regulators authored that "debanking" strain.

The first question to Gould was on that situation, with Scott asking whether he'd commit to reversing that previous stance, to which Gould responded, "absolutely."

For the crypto industry, Atkins' responses on crypto matters are potentially more urgent. But he wasn't questioned on his views about next steps for cryptocurrency oversight, nor about the legislative efforts poised to remake U.S. crypto policy.