The upcoming bill known as the Digital Commodity Exchange Act 2022 will make several regulations not addressed in the SEC of CFTC.
There are talks of introducing a new bill that was created by a bipartisan lawmakers group including the leading Republican from the House of Agriculture Committee. As per the details, the bill will regulate developers exchanges and dealers to work with the digital assets that include stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies including bitcoin.
The bill goes by The Digital Commodity Exchange Act of 2022 that is supposed to expand the regulatory power of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The bill was sponsored by the ranking Republican member at the House Agriculture Committee, Representative Glenn Thompson along with Representative Tom Emmer. This bill has pulled support from other representatives as well including democratic representative Ro Khanna and Darren Soto, who signed on the bill as co sponsors.
The bill would include several things as mentioned in the shared documents. It would allow the agency which supervised by the Agriculture Committee due to its historic role in regulation of derivative markets for food material like grains and other agricultural staples, the US CFTC, tp register and then regulate the trading venues provides spot or cash digital offering commodity market as the cryptocurrency exchange platform. That means CFTC would then regulate the cryptocurrency exchanges for instance Coinbase and FTX US, etc.
Chairman of CFTC, Rostin Behnam during the confirmation hearing had asked the committee itself to consider authority expansion for the CFTC more than its historical role where it played as derivatives regulator. The bill would allow, as writer, for that it would let the central agency to regulate the spot trading of crypto commodities, where the derivatives and future market would let the traders to speculate the direction in which the asset price is headed while spot market would allow traders for selling or buying the assets a the current price.
On top of that the bill would give jurisdiction to the CFTC on digital assets that would not convery rights and responsibilities that are typically associated with the matter of security. While the SEC would still handle the crypto based securities where everything else than this would be regulated by the CFTC essentially.
For industry, it has been a sticking point as some projects are not certain if the regulator views their tokens or coins as security or not and only find it out followed by an enforcement action. However, according to the bill, crypto exchanges would need to seek approval from the CFTC before beginning any new digital commodities’ trading.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/04/29/is-house-bill-really-aiming-to-give-crypto-exchanges-regulation-authority-to-cftc/