The senior advisor for digital assets and innovation at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC], Valerie Szczepanik, is of the belief that the crypto-winter that has enveloped the coin market for over a year, is set to end, with a “crypto spring” taking its place.
At the recently held South by South West [SXSW] conference in Austin, Texas, Szczepanik stated that regulators will be keeping a close watch, when the cryptocurrency market turns in the bulls’ favour.
She stated,
“I do think if we hope to smell the crypto spring in the air, it will take people walking with the regulators. But I do think the spring is going to come.”
The SEC does not believe in stifling innovation in the realms of finance and technology, but it will maintain a grey area in terms of regulating new businesses, Szczepanik said during a Daniel Kahan Q&A session.
Regulators will work better if the rules they implement are not absolute, and can be worked around depending on the situation at hand. In her own words,
“The lack of bright-line rules allows regulators to be more flexible.”
She also added that the key with introducing regulation, especially for a volatile industry like digital assets, was precision and timing. Regulation should not be “precipitous,” as that would “end up steering the technology one way or another,” Szczepanik said.
On the topic of stablecoins, she categorized fiat-pegged crypto into two. The first maintains a fixed price, reflecting the underlying currency, while the other fluctuates keeping the aforementioned coin’s price constant. She called the latter, algorithmic stablecoins.
However, Szczepanik added, these “labels,” will not distract regulatory authorities as the SEC would “give it a label it deserves under the law.” She further stated that stablecoins will be put in the category of securities by the SEC.
Following Szczepanik’s statements, the cryptocurrency market saw a massive surge, with the total market cap rising by $6 billion overnight. bitcoin [BTC], the top cryptocurrency, breached the $4,000 mark, thanks to a bullish wave. Other major coins saw massive spikes too, most notably, bitcoin Cash [BCH], Litecoin [LTC], and Ethereum [ETH]. At press time, every single coin in the top-20 was trading in the green.
The adviser’s comment came a day after the CBOE Futures Exchange [CFE] delisted their bitcoin Futures contract [XBT] for March. Following months of low XBT trading volumes, the Chicago-based exchange decided to concede the niche market to their competitor Chicago Mercantile Exchange [CME].
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Published at Sun, 17 Mar 2019 05:26:17 +0000
