Draft of Lummis-Gillibrand Crypto Bill Expected in April

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said a new draft of the bipartisan crypto bill put forward by herself and Senator Cynthia Lummis is expected to be released in April.

A new draft of the highly anticipated crypto bill introduced by Senators Gillibrand and Lummis is expected to be released to Congress in April after being deferred in 2022. According to reports by Cointelegraph, Senator Gillibrand asked CFTC chair Rostin Behnam in a March 8 Senate Agriculture Committee hearing on oversight for his opinion on the bill. Senator Gillibrand said during the meeting that the next draft of the proposed legislation would be made available in mid-April.

Senator Gillibrand said:

Our ambition is to make sure that there is a place to start a national conversation about a holistic approach to digital assets.

She added:

To make sure that digital assets have the character of securities are regulated by the SEC, to have the assets that have the [unintelligible] of commodities are regulated by the CFTC, to make sure stablecoins can be overseen by the OCC, to make sure that there are tax provisions for the entire industry.

Last week, the Senators spoke at the Milken Institute Future of Digital Assets Symposium. Gillibrand said the revised draft would be more detailed regarding defining tokens and clarified some definitions regulators and industry members have taken issue with. Blockworks reports that Senator Gillibrand said:

We are trying to address some of the concerns we heard, we are going to try to build out some of the regulatory framework that we left for studies in the first version, and so it might also be more thorough than the first version.

Lummis-Gillibrand Bill in Sum

Better known as the “Responsible Financial Innovation Act,” the bill is set to contain the most comprehensive legislation for crypto to date and aims to regulate the market. The bill primarily aims to pass authority over crypto regulation from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC). The bill:

Grants the CFTC exclusive spot market jurisdiction over all fungible digital assets which are not securities, including ancillary assets.

The bill also includes a definition of the Howey test, used to determine whether cryptos are securities, which the Chairman of the SEC, Gary Gensler, argues, most crypto projects are. The bill also deals with stablecoins and will require stablecoin issuers to have 100% backing on coins that can be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio with the U.S. dollar at any given time.

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