Crypto CEOs To Testify Before Congress This Month

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A motorcade carrying President Joe Biden to the United States Capitol in Washington, DC on October 1, 2021; used here as a stock photo. Photo: Mandel Ngan / AFP (Getty Images)

Another day, another chance for Congress to finally understand what bitcoin is: Cryptocurrency CEOs to travel to the House to testify on digital assets on December 8, according to an announcement by Representative Maxine Waters .

The House Financial Services Committee will hear testimony from a host of cryptocurrency CEOs, including Jeremy Allaire of Circle, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, Brian Brooks of Bitfury, Chad Casacarilla of Paxos, Denelle Dixon of the Stellar Development Foundation and Alesia Haas of Coinbase. The hearing will be titled “Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States,” although anyone interested will need to tune in to see what ends up being discussed. .

There has been growing interest in cryptocurrency by Congress, but perhaps a bit too late, as the multibillion dollar market may theoretically be able to crash the economy (or all of it). less, to reproduce the bursting of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s). Earlier this year, Waters introduced the Digital Assets Task Force, which is made up of Democratic members of various committees and intends to propose legislation to regulate the cryptocurrency market.

Congress has already held several hearings with prominent industry figures, and the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Sherrod Brown, recently asked a number of crypto firms to pass on information relating to a class. tokens called stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is tied to assets like the US dollar that are much more stable than the highly speculative cryptocurrency market.

One concern that has been raised about stablecoins is that in the event of an economic crisis, the entities that control them will not have enough reserves to maintain a 1: 1 exchange rate, which could result in a decline of the value of the assets to which they’re pegged (like the dollar). The Treasury Department recommended that stablecoins be subject to “appropriate federal oversight” in early November.

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Senior central bank officials around the world, including the Federal Reserve, have expressed concern over the possible impact of cryptocurrency, and the Fed has considered the possibility of launching its own US digital currency. The Securities and Exchange Commission asserts greater authority to regulate parts of the cryptocurrency market, while in October the Department of Justice formed a task force called the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to investigate scams, crooked exchanges and money laundering.

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