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SEC Chairman Says CFTC Should Get More Power to Oversee Stablecoins: Report

Gary Gensler pointed out that the CFTC doesn't have direct authority to write rules for the firms that issue stablecoins.

Updated Oct 17, 2022, 4:31 p.m. Published Oct 14, 2022, 6:26 p.m.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Friday the Commodity Futures Trading Commission should be given more authority to police stablecoins, according to a report by Reuters.

Speaking at event in Washington, Gensler argued that stablecoins are very similar to money-market markets and should be regulated accordingly, Reuters wrote.

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And while the CFTC has regulatory authority over dollar-backed stablecoin issuers in the areas of fraud and manipulation, it doesn’t have “direct regulatory authorities over the underlying non-security tokens,“ Gensler pointed out.

Momentum in Congress is gaining to make the CFTC the regulator of the spot market for tokens that aren’t considered securities, such as bitcoin, while the SEC would oversee those cryptocurrencies that are considered securities.

SEC CFTC Gary Gensler stablecoin regulation

Nelson Wang

Nelson edits features and opinion stories and was previously CoinDesk’s U.S. News Editor for the East Coast. He has also been an editor at Unchained and DL News, and prior to working at CoinDesk, he was the technology stocks editor and consumer stocks editor at TheStreet. He has also held editing positions at Yahoo.com and Condé Nast Portfolio’s website, and was the content director for aMedia, an Asian American media company. Nelson grew up on Long Island, New York and went to Harvard College, earning a degree in Social Studies. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.