With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and their major assets, a question has been raised about which financial watchdog should oversee them in the United States and ensure their compliance with the regulation.
A candidate for the position is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), whose chairman Rostin Behnam explained why his agency should be the primary crypto regulator during a fireside chat at NYU School of Law on September 29, CoinDesk reports.
In his opinion, bringing crypto regulation under the jurisdiction of his agency could prove beneficial to the industry and could even lead to its growth. He stressed the following:
“Growth might occur if we have a well-regulated space. (…) Bitcoin might double in price if there’s a CFTC-regulated market.”
According to Benham, a clear regulatory framework would provide institutional investors with more reassurance and encourage them to become more interested in the sector:
“These incumbent institutions in the crypto space see a massive opportunity for institutional inflows that will only occur if there’s a regulatory structure around these markets.”
Benham reportedly expressed his expectation in July that cryptos such as Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) would become part of Integral mainstream financial portfolios in the U.S.
Early in August, the U.S. Senate agriculture committee proposed a bill that would give the CFTC regulatory control over spot markets for newly defined 'digital commodities'.
Following this, the chair of the CFTC discussed the possibility of the agency taking on crypto regulation in the future. He stated that the agency was prepared for this possibility, as reported by Finbold.
Benham recently announced that he had already authorized the CFTC to prepare to be the leading and fully funded regulator for a significant part of the cryptocurrency industry.
In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to establish itself as the primary crypto regulator, but it has a poor reputation because of litigation against crypto firms such as Ripple, whose CEO accused the agency of being a bully and attempting to regulate by means of enforcement.
