Digital assets and cryptocurrency are definitely lacking in enforcement authority in certain areas of the United States of America. While there is some support in certain states, the overall picture has not been very good.
Well, the CTFC or Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been trying to make certain changes in that regard. According to the chairperson of CTFC Rostin Behnam, bringing the entire crypto market into the light will just allow us to see what things are going on underneath and not really help with enforcement authority. “Bringing this market into the light … will only allow us to see what’s going on underneath the hood,” mentioned Rostin Behnam.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Rostin Behnam is definition looking towards the members of Congress to address the lack of authority when it comes to enforcement of the digital asset space.
At a certain hearing on Wednesday which was titled “Examining Digital Assets: Risks, Regulation, and Innovation,” Behnam mentioned to his lawmakers who are working with the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry that the authority held by CFTC shouldn’t just be limited to addressing the manipulation and fraud related to digital assets and there should be a clear and transparent framework of regulation in the association in the first place, according to the best news site for cryptocurrency.
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Behnam also added that since there was just a particular patchwork of certain regulations as well as enforcement authority across different government agencies, the actions that are taken by the agency in the last 7 years have relied more on the whistleblowers and the tips that helped in bringing the scams related to cryptocurrency as well as other illicit activities into the attention space of the CTFC.
“We have a number of exchange-traded derivatives on crypto assets on several registered CFTC exchanges, but the visibility to the underlying market is limited at most,” mentioned Behnam. “In essence, this is an unregulated market […] there is so much that we are not able to see because of this limited authority.”
The CFTC chair also added: “We don’t have any of these very advanced tools to monitor markets so it’s giving us a very, very narrow lens into what is actually happening in the market. This is why I think as you contemplate more regulatory authority for the CFTC, bringing this market into the light so to speak with more transparency will only allow us to see what’s going on underneath the hood.”
Behnam was serving as the acting chairman for the CTFC for almost a year ever since he joined in the month of January 2021. He was further confirmed into the Senate just in the previous month and hence he was able to address the agency of the government and its enforcement issues for the digital asset space.
With Behnam serving as chair, the CFTC has been a part of enforcement cases against crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX — in which the firm agreed to pay a $100 million civil monetary penalty — and Tether and Bitfinex, which the commission fined $42.5 million in October.
“There is no one regulator, either state or federal, with sufficient visibility into digital asset commodity trading activity to fully police conflicts of interest and deceptive trading practices impacting retail customers,” mentioned Behnam in the written statement that he made for the committee.
The second panel regarding the hearing of the Senate Agriculture Committee will provide lawmakers the chance to properly address all the experts of the industry including the CEO of FTX US, Samuel Bankman-Fried.
Apart from that, on the other side, different members of House Members belonging to the Community on Financial Services have also grouped together in order to have a discussion on certain recommendations from the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets report on stablecoins on Tuesday.
