Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler will resign on Jan. 20, the agency announced Thursday. This cleared the way for newly elected President Donald Trump to immediately choose a replacement.

Gensler took over the SEC in 2021, and under his leadership the commission has taken an ambitious but controversial approach to several regulatory issues, including cryptocurrencies. Trump has not yet announced his choice to lead the SEC, but it is expected that the next chairman will be friendlier to Wall Street and crypto.

SEC commissioners serve five-year terms, so Gensler could theoretically have stayed until at least 2026. Instead, he is leaving the agency entirely, as was widely expected.

“The staff and the Commission are highly mission-driven, focused on protecting investors, facilitating capital formation and ensuring markets work for both investors and issuers,” Gensler said in a news release. “The staff is made up of real public servants. It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve alongside them on behalf of everyday Americans and ensure our capital markets remain the best in the world.”

Under Gensler, the SEC pushed for more disclosure from publicly traded companies and financial advisors to investors. These new areas include risks around climate change and cybersecurity. The agency also sped up settlement times for stock trades to just one day, a change fueled in part by the meme stock trades in early 2021.

Gensler’s SEC has had several high-profile disputes with the crypto industry, including a legal battle with Grayscale to block bitcoin ETFs. Grayscale won in court and billions of dollars have flowed into these new funds since they launched in January. The SEC has sued several major digital asset companies in recent years over the way they handled or sold cryptocurrencies Coin basewith mixed results.

The SEC also disagreed Tesla In recent years, CEO Elon Musk has been investigating, among other things, possible fraud surrounding his $44 billion purchase of the social media company Twitter, now known as court-ordered testimony. .

Under Gensler, the SEC has been investigating Musk’s compliance with an earlier settlement agreement that required the billionaire CEO to have a securities attorney review some of his social media posts about Tesla before sharing them.

Musk, who has been publicly critical of the SEC, campaigned with Trump, donated at least $130 million to his campaign and will work with the new administration as co-head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump could have an opportunity to quickly overhaul the SEC. In addition to Gensler’s soon-to-be vacant seat, two of the other four commissioners’ terms expire in 2024 or 2025.

Commissioners can remain in office for up to 18 months after the end of their term of office. Presidential appointments to the SEC are subject to Senate ratification.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed reporting.