US regulators warm up towards crypto industry

Cryptocurrency supporters may rejoice as the heads of both SEC and CFTC are loyal towards digital assets.

The Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Hester M. Peirce also known as “Crypto Mom” and a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Gary Gensler delivered a speech at the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019 on March 9.

Ms. Peirce spoke about the self-regulation of the industry, and her remarks followed Gensler’s proposal to create a robust regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency industry on a nationwide level. He believes that a regulatory system will ensure investor protection, reduce money laundering cases and remove regulatory discrepancies in various states.

“One really important thing to remember is that people regulate each other in their interactions with one another, and that’s the whole purpose of the Bitcoin idea, that it would be a community that would be able to regulate itself. As problems arise, people in that community are thinking about how to deal with those problems. One model would be to have a government regulator, but I don’t think that’s the only model,” SEC Comissioner Hester Peirce, responded to his ideas.

She also provided some insights on the fate of Bitcoin ETFs. Commenting the rejection of Winklevoss-brothers application, she said that the Commission should have accepted it.

“When [the SEC] said no to this particular application, I thought the SEC went beyond our statutory authority. I thought we should have allowed this to trade,” she said.