The House Committee on Financial Services met, and some of crypto’s most famous figures in the US were there.
Six prominent cryptocurrency CEOs attended yesterday’s House Committee hearing on “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States.” Jeremy Allaire (Circle), Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX), Brian Brooks (Bitfury), Chad Cascarilla (Paxos), Denelle Dixon (Stellar), and Alesia Haas attended the meeting (Coinbase).
Jeremy Allaire addressed a long-standing issue: the absence of explicit regulation of stablecoins. Circle USD’s CEO, who Goldman Sachs sponsors, has urged stricter regulation of stablecoin issuers.
Paxos CEO Chad Cascarilla concurred, adding that blockchain technology may be utilized to strengthen the United States’ digital financial infrastructure by speeding up clearinghouse settlement. Settlement timings caused a liquidity issue for the trading app RobinHood during the GameStop short squeeze in January 2021, resulting in a disputed trading stoppage.
Bitfury CEO Brian Brooks stated that the US government’s overly restrictive stance on crypto ETFs. According to him, the tight rules cause a brain drain to the detriment of the United States:
There is a reason why crypto talent is no longer concentrated in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the original commercial Internet. Sure, some talent has merely moved from Silicon Valley to Miami — but a surprising number of talented founders have left for Portugal, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, and other jurisdictions that are not at all unregulated but that have a more positive posture toward innovation and growth.
House Representative Patrick McHenry agrees, calling the current regulatory structure “clunky” and “out of date”:
We need reasonable rules of the road, we know that. We don’t need knee-jerk reactions by lawmakers to regulate out of fear of the unknown rather than seeking to understand. And that fear of the unknown in the move to regulate before understanding will only stifle American ingenuity and put us at a competitive disadvantage.
