Crypto CEOs Head to Capitol Hill to Confuse the Hell Out Congress

Another day, one other likelihood for Congress to perhaps finally figure out what a bitcoin is: cryptocurrency CEOs are heading to the House to testify on digital assets on Dec. 8, in accordance with an announcement by Representative Maxine Waters.

The House Committee on Financial Services will hear testimony from a bevy of cryptocurrency CEOs, together with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire, FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Bitfury’s Brian Brooks, Paxos’s Chad Casacarilla, Stellar Development Foundation’s Denelle Dixon, and Coinbase’s Alesia Haas. The listening to will probably be titled “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States,” although anybody must tune in to see what really finally ends up being mentioned.

Congress has taken a deepening curiosity in cryptocurrency, although maybe a bit too late, because the multi-trillion-dollar market could also be theoretically capable of crashing the economy (or on the very least, replicate the dot-com bubble burst of the late Nineties). Earlier this yr, Waters launched the Digital Assets Working Group, which is comprised of Democratic members from varied committees and intends to propose legislation to control the cryptocurrency market.

Congress has already held a number of hearings that includes outstanding figures within the business, and Senate Banking Committee chair Senator Sherrod Brown not too long ago requested quite a lot of crypto corporations handy over info associated to a category of token called stablecoins—a sort of cryptocurrency whose worth is pegged to belongings just like the U.S. greenback which are way more steady than the wildly speculative cryptocurrency market.

One concern that has been raised about stablecoins is that within the occasion of an financial disaster, the entities that management them received’t have sufficient reserves to take care of a 1:1 change price, probably dragging down the worth of the belongings to which they’re pegged (just like the greenback). The Treasury Department recommended that stablecoins be topic to “appropriate federal oversight” in early November.

Senior figures from central banks internationally together with the Federal Reserve have expressed concern concerning the potential influence of cryptocurrency, and the Fed has mulled the opportunity of launching its own U.S. digital currency. The Securities and Exchange Commission is asserting greater authority to control components of the cryptocurrency market, whereas in October the Department of Justice shaped a process power referred to as the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to investigate scams, crooked exchanges, and cash laundering.