The Hard Thing About Crypto Purgatory

Jack SoloweyOn Thursday, September 15, 2022, the Senate Agriculture Committee will hold a hearing on the bipartisan Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022 (the Stabenow ‐​Boozman bill). Thebill seeks to answer one of the most frequent questions in crypto policy: who will oversee crypto marketplaces and what will that look like? While the bill makes important strides – appropriately giving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as opposed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), exclusive jurisdiction over “digital commodity” trades – it sidesteps the hard question of what exactly a digital commodity is.To be clear, the bill defines a digital commodity as a “fungible digital form of personal property that can be possessed and transferred person‐​to‐​person without necessary reliance on an intermediary.” There are things to like in this concise definition, particularly its focus on disintermediated peer‐​to‐​peer transfers. Nonethele ss, it’s what the definition leaves out that can pose future challenges.For one, the bill goes on to provide that digital commodities include “property commonly known as cryptocurrency or virtual currency, such as Bitcoin and Ether,” but this circular statement does little to clarify what to make of the broader universe of crypto tokens. This is notable because “digital commodity” also expressly excludes “a security” from its scope, leaving open a kind ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs