WASHINGTON—Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Gary Gensler
expressed concern Tuesday that efforts in Congress to write down laws for the cryptocurrency business might compromise laws that govern the broader capital markets.
Asked a couple of invoice launched final week by Sens.
Cynthia Lummis
(R., Wyo.) and
Kirsten Gillibrand
(D., N.Y.), Mr. Gensler initially demurred, saying he would like to debate the proposed laws with the senators. But he then urged that legislative modifications concentrating on cryptocurrencies might have implications for inventory exchanges or mutual funds.
“We don’t want to undermine the protections we have in a $100 trillion capital market,” Mr. Gensler stated at The Wall Street Journal’s CFO Network Summit. “Like behaviors should have like treatment.”
Asked if the current rout in cryptocurrency costs added new urgency to the SEC’s issues in regards to the market, Mr. Gensler stated, “the urgency is highlighted, but the urgency has been there.”
The Lummis-Gillibrand invoice, which is unlikely to move the present Congress, goals to create a “complete regulatory framework for digital assets,” its sponsors say. One of its provisions would search to supply extra readability round which cryptocurrencies meet the authorized definition of securities that the SEC ought to regulate, a rallying level for the business.
But the invoice would carve some cryptocurrencies out of the SEC’s jurisdiction. It additionally would create new ideas within the almost 90-year-old securities legal guidelines that will enable issuers of some digital tokens to fulfill lighter disclosure necessities than public corporations face.
“We’re not looking to extend our jurisdiction,” Mr. Gensler stated. “But these tokens are being offered to the public, and the public is hoping for a better future. That’s the characteristics of an investment contract,” a kind of safety.
Mr. Gensler’s remarks distinction with these of his counterpart on the SEC’s sister regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which might achieve vital authority underneath the Lummis-Gillibrand invoice.
At an occasion final week, CFTC Chairman
Rostin Behnam
stated the proposed laws “does a very good job” of clarifying the excellence between securities and non-securities within the crypto market and in empowering the CFTC to police the latter class of belongings.
Write to Paul Kiernan at paul.kiernan@wsj.com
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Appeared within the June 15, 2022, print version as ‘SEC Head Voices Concerns on Crypto Bill.’
