Regulating Crypto

Firms such as Circle, Binance and Coinbase say new bipartisan legislation will attract banks to the market, providing a boost for mainstream payments.

Many in the crypto community were confused by the president's announcement that his proposed strategic crypto reserve will include tokens beyond bitcoin.

The Federal Reserve's outgoing vice chair for supervision touted a "culture of curiosity" among the central bank's supervisors, but said it is a challenge to balance responsibility and innovation.

The lack of government clarity on stablecoins has prevented traditional financial institutions like large banks from entering the space.

The ABA, BPI and SIFMA are among the groups asking Sacks to make it easier for banks to engage in crypto-related activity.

Despite crypto-friendly signals coming from Washington, getting a bank account still appears to be a challenge for crypto businesses and investors.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said they would try to pass crypto and stablecoin bills in the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

Federal Reserve Gov. Michelle Bowman is widely seen as the president's most likely choice for vice chair for supervision, a position soon to be vacated by Michael Barr. But while Bowman is the administration's most straightforward option, it's not the only one being considered.

The Federal Reserve chair said banks are well situated to handle risks related to crypto customers, but added that regulatory scrutiny of banks' direct engagement with the assets will be greater than for simple custody arrangements.

President Donald Trump and the first lady released their own cryptocurrencies. Experts compare them to Beanie Babies and dogecoin.

Bankers applauded the news, which means that it's possible for crypto-custody efforts at depository institutions to scale.

The executive order also calls for regulations to be written for the digital asset industry.

Several crypto-friendly voices join the Senate Banking Committee from Nebraska and Ohio, while Democrats leave a banking policy expert off the House Financial Services Committee.

Lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee touched on a number of issues overlapping with banking and the Securities and Exchange Commission, including SAB 121 and stablecoin legislation.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., seek to pass legislation to regulate cryptocurrency before the end of this Congress.

The House didn't meet the two-thirds threshold needed to overturn President Joe Biden's veto of a resolution nullifying staff accounting bulletin 121, which requires that banks hold cryptocurrency held in custody on their balance sheet as liabilities.

A bill to draw crypto's jurisdictional lines between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is pitting increasingly crypto-friendly Democrats against consumer protection hawks in the Senate.

The bill includes a provision that would codify Republicans' and the banking industry's complaints with a Securities and Exchange Commission measure that banks say would bar them from custodying crypto assets.

Zeke Faux, a Bloomberg journalist, describes his two-year odyssey to better understand cryptocurrencies in his book "Number Go Up." His work proves to be an entertaining deep dive into an industry riddled with scams.

Ripple, Coinbase and Circle all received licenses to operate under the nation's stablecoin regulations, which offer more clarity than American rules do.