Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: America's Cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act' Fails Spectacularly, Despite
Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/16/0454...

"The crypto industry's top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in
spectacular fashion," reports Barron's. A procedural motion to advance the
bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all
Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with
the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn't expected to pick the bill
back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most
crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of
firms like Coinbase Global... The vote is especially bitter for the crypto
industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and
campaign expenditures over the past year to even get to this point. Crypto
regulation doesn't even register among the issues voters care most about, and
the industry has created massive political action committees to insert itself
into the Washington agenda and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers who
might oppose them... Democrats who voted against the bill said that it needed
to do more to rein in [Trump's] crypto dealings to get their support. Some
GOP lawmakers also voted against the motion after pressure from community
bank executives. Bankers argued that the bill needed a stronger ban on high-
yield crypto accounts to protect their deposits, a contention that crypto
executives and the White House said was nonsense. Concerns about the bill
"intensified after President Trump disclosed he and his family had earned
$1.4 billion last year from his crypto ventures," reports NPR. "The massive
bill - which stretches over 600 pages - would have established the first
regulations for the crypto sector in U.S. history. But opponents saw it as
the industry's attempt to encode into law a set of rules they saw as far too
lenient on the industry, without enough safeguards." A research note from an
analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading predicts the bill is now
likely tabled until at least 2030, Barron's notes. But they also report what
the crypto industry could do next: [C]rypto firms will be leaning heavily on
Trump's regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity
Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department, all of whom have said
they plan to move swiftly to implement industry friendly rules if a bill
didn't pass. The SEC has already dropped all major enforcement actions
against crypto firms and has begun to introduce rules that make it easier to
raise money from crypto sales without running afoul of the law. The agency is
also expected to implement rules making it easier to tokenize traditional
assets like stocks. The friendly regulatory environment will in effect give
the industry a little more than two years to sink roots into the traditional
financial system and consumers' wallets. Even if the SEC took a harsh view of
the industry in the future, as it did in President Joe Biden's
administration, the agency at that point might find it difficult to put the
genie back in the bottle.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528