SEC’s Chairman Gary Gensler confirmed in a Tuesday hearing of Financial Services that the SEC has no authorization or plan to ban crypto.
During the questions of the House Committee, Gensler highlighted that banning crypto is not under SEC’s mandate. “That would be up to Congress,” he added.
He also added the following remarks:
“It’s a matter of how we get this field within the investor consumer protection that we have and also working with bank regulators and others — how do we ensure that the Treasury department has it within anti-money laundering, tax compliance.”
According to Gensler, financial stability issues can result from stable coins. This is the current priority of the SEC.
Representative Patrick McHenry asked Gensler about the actions taken during his leadership. He accused him of failing to according to the agency’s “long-held practice of noticing comments on rulemaking and procedures.” Gensler replied that the SEC follows the administrative procedures act.
McHenry also asked about his 2019 comments about SEC classifying Bitcoin and Ether as commodities. “I’m not going to get into any one token, but I think the securities laws are quite clear. If you’re raising money […] and the investing public […] have a reasonable expectation of profits based on the efforts of others, that fits within the securities law.”
Meanwhile, Bitcoin hits the monthly high of $52K for the first time in a month. It has kept climbing the charts since the last week, and the experts expect it to hit $55K soon.
