- A revised bill from Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand is dropping today
- The revision of last year’s Responsible Financial Innovation Act has seen input from various agencies
- The bill would classify crypto as a commodity and put it under the CFTC’s jurisdiction
A new bill proposed by US Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand will be submitted today that classifies cryptocurrencies as commodities. The revamped “Responsible Financial Innovation Act” aims to classify most crypto assets in the same vein as gold, which would bring them under the auspices of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which the Senators claim is “stifling innovation in financial technologies.”
Lummis Worried SEC Will Kill Bill
Gillibrand and Lummis submitted the bill last year, with the initial offering including some very interesting proposals such as wiping away tax for transactions under $200 and tasking the CFTC with regulating the spot market. While the bill wasn’t accepted it also wasn’t totally dismissed either, with the likes of the SEC offering its input despite its agenda to kill the crypto sector entirely.
Lummis told Wired that the SEC has “seen” the bill in its revised form and that the pair have “incorporated some of their changes,” although she is worried that the SEC will “come in at the last minute to put their kibosh on this.” Wired also cited someone who has read the act as saying that, if passed, it would compel crypto exchanges to keep their customers’ assets in third-party trusts and stop them from trading on their own exchanges, as FTX famously did.
The Crypto World Awaits
The new bill also advocated giving the CFTC the power to supervise “material affiliates” of exchanges (e.g. Alameda Research to use the FTX example again) and would ban “rehypothecation,” where lenders would be banned from financing digital assets with collateral already pledged for different loans.
Given that the bill has seen a number of cooks changing the recipe since the first version, the crypto world is now left waiting to see just how different this revised bill is from the first effort.
