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US Senator Wants Congress to Step in with Crypto Guidance – Urges SEC to Provide Much More Clarity in Regulations – Regulation Bitcoin News
US Senator Pat Toomey says Congress should step in and provide a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency. He stressed that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not share its crypto regulatory framework with lawmakers, noting that Chairman Gary Gensler “owes us much more clarity on how and why he intends to apply SEC regulations.”
US senator wants Congress to step in on crypto regulation
US Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), a ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, discussed cryptocurrency regulation in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday.
Commenting on whether the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is too slow to regulate cryptocurrency, he said: “I think the problem is that the SEC doesn’t share the framework that they use with us.”
The senator went on to reference SEC Chairman Gary Gensler stating that most crypto-tokens are securities, saying:
Gary Gensler famously argues that virtually all crypto-tokens are securities. I think reasonable people can disagree with that.
The lawmaker noted that while Gensler “would exempt bitcoin from that classification,” he said that “pretty much everything else … is a security.”
Senator Toomey explained that the SEC chairman “doesn’t go on to say how he would apply the existing frameworks that we use to regulate securities issuance and trading to a very, very new and very different technology where some of these things don’t fit — like custody rules, clearance rules — those things have no application. He hasn’t given any clarity on that.”
Toomey opined:
I actually think Congress should step in and provide some guidance.
“I think crypto is sufficiently different even if you want to argue that these tokens are securities,” the senator continued, adding that it is indisputable that cryptocurrencies “are very different from a stock or a bond, and therefore Congress should intervene . and provide a framework.”
The legislator concluded:
Meanwhile, Chairman Gensler owes us much more clarity about how and why he intends to apply SEC regulations.
Gensler recently revealed that he has asked staff at the commission to fine-tune crypto compliance. In addition, he said he has “asked SEC staff to work directly with founders to get their tokens registered and regulated, where appropriate, as securities.” The Securities and Exchange Commission is also setting up a dedicated office to review crypto archives.
What do you think of Senator Pat Toomey’s comments and do you think Congress should step in and provide a regulatory framework for crypto? Let us know in the comments section below.
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