U.S. The U.S. senator Pat Toomey said that Congress should provide a regulation framework for crypto. He stressed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is not sharing its framework for regulating crypto 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 intervene in crypto regulation
U.S. U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, a ranking senator of the Senate Banking Committee discussed cryptocurrency regulation during a Bloomberg interview Thursday.
Commenting on whether the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is too slow in regulating cryptocurrency, he opined: “I think the problem is that the SEC isn’t sharing with us the framework that they are using.”
He then referred to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, who stated that crypto tokens were securities.
Gary Gensler has made a famous argument that crypto tokens all constitute securities. Reasonable people could disagree with this, I believe.
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 — these things don’t have any application. He hasn’t provided any clarity on that.”
Toomey said:
Actually, I believe Congress should be able to provide guidance.
“I think crypto is sufficiently different even if you want to argue that these tokens are securities,” the senator further noted, adding that it is indisputable that cryptocurrencies “are very different from a stock or a bond, and therefore Congress ought to step in and provide a framework.”
The lawmaker concluded that:
We owe Chairman Gensler more information about how and why he will apply the SEC regulations.
Gensler has recently disclosed that he asked the Commission staff to improve crypto compliance. In addition, he said he has “asked the SEC staff to work directly with entrepreneurs to get their tokens registered and regulated, where appropriate, as securities.” The securities regulator is also setting up a dedicated office to review crypto filings.
Let us know your thoughts on Senator Pat Toomey’s comments. Do you believe Congress should provide crypto regulatory guidelines? Please comment below.
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