Behnam’s Response on CFTC’s Expansion in The Crypto Cash Market

Rostin Behnam strongly supports the quality of CFTC regulation and back fire with his response.
Behnam is working on a campaign as a part of CFTC expansion to the crypto cash market.

On Oct. 14 2022, CFTC Chair, Rostin Behnam speaks at the Financial Markets Quality Conference at Georgetown University’s McDonough’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy.

At the recent IIFinDC Annual Membership Meeting, Behnam became the part of the meeting with Sonja Gibbs, Managing Director and Head of Sustainable Finance, Global Policy Initiatives IIF.

CFTC Behnam at IIFinDC

CFTC Regulations

CFTC Behnam stated about the CFTC regulations that “Those who describe CFTC as light touch just don’t know it.” Behnam describes his perception of a regulatory “light touch,” that then came at the point of his thoughts to expand CFTC authority on crypto cash markets and financial policies.

Behnam mentioned that he wants more direct authorities on the crypto cash market as the CFTC already added more than 60 enforcement cases against crypto related projects.

In continuation he said that “Every single one of those enforcement actions has been driven by customer complaints or whistleblowers or tips that we have received. None of it is driven by surveillance tools or market oversight tools that we retain in traditionally regulated markets.”

Behnam also conveyed that the Passage of legislation, presented by Senate Agriculture Committee Chair, Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and supported by the committee’s top Republican, Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., would permit for more direct market supervision.

The CFTC further added that “So what I’ve called for is cash market authority in the digital asset, commodity space, and that would provide us legislative authority over cash markets. These would be the trading platforms, the intermediaries or the broker-dealer. The custodians, potentially the data repositories, and those core infrastructure and components of markets.”

Behnam even wants to include AI and machine learning for the financial market surveillance and enforcement as he added that “We need to modernize our data infrastructure.”

FTX’s Idea

Furthermore, the CFTC Chair marked FTX’s idea to cut down the middlemen and called it an “evolution.” He expressed as “This is a unique intersection of the crypto space and traditional finance. I think this is potentially – and I emphasize the ‘potential’ – another phase in the evolution of market structure, innovation and disruption.”

In the crypto industry, he describes the entry of crypto natives and explains what they found and states that “They come into the traditional market space and they’re just a bit puzzled. They’re like, ‘Why do you do it this way? We have a way that’s more efficient, where we can have trading execution that’s quicker with better pricing, and we can have settlement and custody in a much better manner.’ That’s where I think we have to learn from each other collectively.”