It’s been two weeks since the shock of the TerraUSD (UST) depegging, but the long waves of this event are still coming in. The Congressional Research Service described the UST crash as a “run-like” scenario and claimed that the crypto industry has not reached the same level of “adequate regulating” as the traditional finance market.
Michael Barr, former advisory board member of Ripple Labs and United States President Joe Biden’s pick for a vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, definitely agrees with that. During the confirmation hearing, he mentioned “some significant risks” that innovative technologies and cryptocurrencies, in particular, bring along.
It’s not only in the U.S. where the regulators got concerned about stablecoins. The executive director of markets of the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Sarah Pritchard, reassured journalists that the FCA will “absolutely” take the depegging incident into account, which is hardly surprising, given the intention of the British Treasury to make stablecoins a payment method.
The recent turmoil even made the Group of Seven nervous, putting spurs on the Financial Stability Board to speed up crypto-asset regulation. Officials from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States even had to set up a special meeting in the 40,000-populated town of Koenigswinter, while the Conservative Party of South Korea went as far as to request a parliamentary hearing on the matter.
17 questions about crypto
How can the U.S. bolster its economic competitiveness in digital assets? The United States Department of Commerce believes that 17 other questions would help us to answer this one. The department will publish a series of 17 questions in a request for comment through the International Trade Administration. Hopefully, the public response will help the department develop a comprehensive regulatory framework.
A battle for 401(k) continues
In another recap of a heated discussion that took place several weeks ago, Florida congressman Byron Donalds introduced the Financial Freedom Act into the United States House of Representatives. The main mission of the bill is to prevent the U.S. Department of Labor from limiting the types of investments that can be included in Americans’ self-directed 401(k) retirement plans that seek to ban retirees from including crypto in their 401(k) plan.
The launch of Chainabuse
Binance, Circle, TRM Labs and four other major crypto companies are aiming at self-regulation by launching a community-driven scam reporting tool, Chainabuse. The platform will help users actively report and discuss fraud cases and get the help of a free-to-use database of illicit activities to investigate projects before making an investment