Draft crypto bill will be released in April, says Senator Gillibrand
According to US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a new draft of the bipartisan crypto bill that she and Senator Cynthia Lummis have developed will be released to the new Congress after being postponed in 2022.
In a March 8 Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Senator Gillibrand asked CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam for his opinion on the crypto bill she had previously drafted with Senator Lummis that aimed to create a regulatory framework for the crypto industry. According to Gillibrand, the next draft of the bill will be available in mid-April.
“Our ambition is to make sure there is a place to start a national conversation about a holistic approach to digital assets,” Gillibrand said. “To ensure that digital assets have the character of securities are regulated by the SEC, having the assets that have [unintelligible] of commodities are regulated by the CFTC, to ensure that stablecoins can be overseen by the OCC, to ensure that there are tax regulations for the entire industry.”
Behnam said Gillibrand and Lummis had “carefully and thoughtfully considered all the components of the market” in the latest draft of the crypto bill, specifically citing potential concerns with stable coins and cybersecurity. The crypto industry experienced a major shakeup following the commencement of the Lummis-Gillibrand bill in March 2022, with firms including FTX, Voyager Digital, BlockFi, Terra and others collapsing.
The CFTC chairman added:
“I think given what we experienced and what we saw with FTX, a premium on obviously segregating assets, on client conflicts of interest and making sure those conflicts are delineated very carefully, I think there are different questions that we probably have to ask in many respects with respect to digital assets in light of cyber security, supplier risk, third party service providers.”
Related: US lawmakers are proposing to amend the Cybersecurity Act to include crypto firms that report potential threats
Although the crypto bill remains bipartisan work between Democrat Gillibrand and Republican Lummis, it is unclear whether the new Congress will move forward with the legislation. Lummis said in July 2022 that for many lawmakers the bill was “a lot for them to digest”. If passed in both the Senate and the House and signed into law, the legislation will likely provide needed regulatory clarity among many crypto projects, including which assets fall under the purview of the SEC and CFTC.
