Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam has said the crypto market will remain unregulated unless the agency he led is given greater authority.
In a May 28 Bloomberg TV interview, Behnam sided with the crypto industry on its long-standing argument that cryptocurrencies are commodities.
“If you look at existing law, the few largest tokens are commodities, which means the SEC does not have jurisdiction over those tokens, which include Bitcoin and Ether,” he said.
He added that the Securities and Exchange Commission currently cannot properly regulate crypto because its law doesn’t allow it to regulate commodities, and the CFTC cannot regulate because it is a derivatives regulator.
Without new authority for the CFTC to regulate “cash markets in digital assets, non-securities,” this will remain an unregulated space, he claimed.
Rostin Behnam on Bloomberg TV. Source: Bloomberg
Behnam comments amid increasing scrutiny of the Trump family’s crypto ventures, which