The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said his agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “have to rely on 70-year-old case law to determine what is a security or commodity.” He emphasized that the SEC and the CFTC are working together to regulate the crypto space, noting that “it is not a turf war.”
CFTC Chairman on Crypto Regulation, Working with SEC
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Rostin Behnam discussed cryptocurrency regulation in an interview with CNBC last week.
In response to a question about whether the CFTC gets along with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and whether the two agencies share resources to regulate the crypto sector, he affirmed.
We are good friends. We can share, we have shared and we will share.
“The difficult thing for the CFTC is that we are a derivatives regulator. We don’t oversee the cash markets. So the authority I’ve asked Congress for is cash authority, so we can go into the bitcoin cash market, the ether cash market, and other digital commodity tokens [markets],” the CFTC Commissioner explained.
Regarding SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s statement that the majority of crypto tokens out there are securities, Behnam said. ‘Well, we need to figure it out legislatively because it is a new asset class. In contrast to traditional asset classes, this asset class has different components and characteristics.” The CFTC boss stated.
We have to rely on 70-year-old precedents to determine what is a security and what is a commodity.
“We have one court case in New York that says bitcoin is a commodity … We are trying to find a reasonable outcome that creates certainty for the market,” he concluded.
Behnam also stressed that it is “not a turf war” between the two regulatory agencies.
SEC Chairman Gensler also previously said that the two regulators are working together to regulate the crypto sector; Gensler acknowledged that bitcoin is a commodity, but said last month that “of the approximately 10,000 tokens in the crypto market . I believe the vast majority are securities.”
Last month, the SEC announced it would establish a dedicated division to review crypto filings; Gensler also said he had asked SEC staff to fine-tune crypto compliance.
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