The four nominees from President Joe Biden to join the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have told lawmakers that they think there needs to be more powers to regulate crypto, Bloomberg wrote Wednesday (March 2).
They said the overseer should have new responsibilities to do such things. Speaking at their confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee, the nominees said the agency’s history overlooking crypto derivatives means it could do more to oversee the increasingly popular digital assets.
Christy Goldsmith Romero, one of the four female nominees, said the agency didn’t have the right visibility to look into the underlying crypto markets.
“It’s very hard to find fraud if you don’t have visibility, you don’t have access,” she said, per the Bloomberg report.
Goldsmith Romero previously worked for around 10 years as special inspector general for the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief program.
Rostin Behnam, agency chair, told lawmakers recently that there should be more authority for the CFTC, along with a budget increase up to $100 million at the least.
The debate in Washington has been going on for some time over how to address digital tokens and what regulators should do so. The current role of the CFTC only encompasses derivatives based on bitcoin and ether, along with looking into various fraud or manipulation.
The report notes that Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has gotten attention for saying much of the responsibility for crypto falls into his agency’s arena, which includes tough investor-protection roles. However, industry executives have rejected that.
PYMNTS wrote that the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry’s hearing on digital assets in February was a potential way to see how the role of the CFTC in supervising crypto and digital assets.
Read more: Senate Hearing on Digital Assets May Test Role of CFTC and DeFi
According to the report, the committee noted that the CFTC had already considered some digital assets to be commodities. The committee also suggested the biggest two digital assets, bitcoin and ether, are commodities, which has been up for debate.
The SEC has said bitcoin might be one, but hasn’t been as clear on ether.
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