US Senator Wants Congress to Step in With Crypto Guidance — Urges SEC to Provide Much More Clarity on Regulations

U.S. Senator Pat Toomey says Congress should step in and provide a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency. He stressed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is not sharing its framework for regulating crypto with lawmakers, noting that Chairman Gary Gensler “owes us much more clarity on how and why he intends to apply SEC regulations.”

US Senator Wants Congress to Step in on Crypto Regulation

U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA), a ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, discussed cryptocurrency regulation in an interview with Bloomberg Thursday.

Commenting on whether the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is too slow in regulating cryptocurrency, he opined: “I think the problem is that the SEC isn’t sharing with us the framework that they are using.”

The senator proceeded to reference SEC Chairman Gary Gensler stating that most crypto tokens are securities, stating:

Gary Gensler famously argues that virtually all crypto tokens are securities. I think reasonable people can disagree with that.

The lawmaker noted that while Gensler “would exempt bitcoin from that classification,” he said that “pretty much everything else … is a security.”

Senator Toomey explained that the SEC chairman “doesn’t go on to say how he would apply the existing frameworks that we use to regulate securities issuance and trading to a very, very new and very different technology where some of these things don’t fit — like custody rules, clearance rules — these things don’t have any application. He hasn’t provided any clarity on that.”

Toomey opined:

I think, actually, Congress should step in and provide some guidance.

“I think crypto is sufficiently different even if you want to argue that these tokens are securities,” the senator further noted, adding that it is indisputable that cryptocurrencies “are very different from a stock or a bond, and therefore Congress ought to step in and provide a framework.”

The lawmaker concluded:

In the meantime, chairman Gensler owes us much more clarity on how and why he intends to apply SEC regulations.

Gensler recently revealed that he has asked the staff at the Commission to fine-tune crypto compliance. In addition, he said he has “asked the SEC staff to work directly with entrepreneurs to get their tokens registered and regulated, where appropriate, as securities.” The securities regulator is also setting up a dedicated office to review crypto filings.