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CFTC Chairman 'Encouraged' by Bill in Congress to Give the Agency More Crypto Oversight
Rostin Behnam noted the bill would allow the CFTC to assess fees on the industry.
AUSTIN, Texas – Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said Thursday that he is “very encouraged” that Congress is making moves to grant his agency more authority over digital asset markets.
“It’s just a positive momentum, I think, for the technology, for the industry, for the economy,” Behnam said at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas,. “There are unique coalitions getting together on this issue, which is very rare in Washington.”
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The CFTC – typically seen as a friendlier option than the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to lead oversight of the industry – has been tackling a few policy questions, such as crypto exchange FTX’s bid to directly clear customers' derivatives, but it’s otherwise waiting for Congress to define its eventual role. That process took a major step earlier this week with the introduction of sweeping legislation from U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
A key aspect of that effort, Behnam said, is the power it gives the CFTC to assess fees on the industry, which would pay for new staff at the agency.
“It allows us to essentially do our job,” he said. “We have to evolve with markets. We have to evolve with technology.”
The recent meltdown of TerraUSD (UST) shows the need for regulation, Behnam said, noting the “terrific fall in price” of the algorithmic stablecoin.
“It validates what has been said, what I’ve said, for the past couple of years,” he said. “We need to put guardrails around the space.”
Jesse Hamilton
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
