How new regulations will further consolidate the role of cryptocurrencies
The US Senate bill to bring cryptocurrencies under control and protect the public is a major triumph for the industry and for all the players involved, mainly because it avoids the supervision of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and proposes to place them under the supervision of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a much smaller agency with an attitude towards the subject that is infinitely less hostile than the SEC’s and its current director, Gary Gensler.
The regulatory aspect is important: applying the same rules to cryptocurrencies and cryptoassets as company shares is not sustainable, and could harm the United States’ potential to be a player in this market. The Senate bill doesn’t say the SEC is too old-fashioned or incapable of regulating these types of assets, but that they should be regulated in the same ways as currencies, commodities, derivatives or other financial products.
The simple fact is that cryptoassets are here to stay, and their value will depend largely on whether people see them as reliable. Does this mean that anything goes, and that the thousands of cryptocurrencies that exist today will survive into the future? Not at all. Because of the open and simple nature of Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous paper on bitcoin that took the blockchain out of a…
