Rep. French Hill said the recent wave of crypto rulemaking from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission does not finish the job for the industry. His argument: agency action cannot replace the market-structure legislation that stalled in the Senate.
Speaking to Fox Business on Wednesday, Hill, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said the two regulators have stepped in where Congress has not acted.
Hill said SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Mike Selig 「have taken steps to use their regulatory power, their exemptive relief, to give definition to digital assets and digital commodities, so we can have a functional system here in the U.S. for this innovative form of finance」.
He also drew a clear line around what those efforts can achieve. 「In my judgement, these regulatory policies fall short of what we have to do, which is have a legislative solution,」 Hill said, while pointing to his authorship of FIT21 in the previous Congress and the Clarity Act in the current one.
Hill still wants a bill passed in the lame-duck session
Hill said he still hopes the legislation can pass during the lame-duck session. 「We need that permanent law change to make sure America is number one in digital assets and blockchain technology,」 he said.
That position runs against a view that has spread since the Clarity Act failed to move forward. The bill would have set the rules for most cryptocurrency activity in the United States and clarified the jurisdictional boundary between the CFTC and the SEC on digital assets.
Last month, however, the Senate failed to advance the bill in a 49-50 vote. After that, the SEC and CFTC continued with their own initiatives, and many in the industry came to believe crypto had stopped waiting on Congress and had instead learned to rely on regulators.
Both agencies have moved quickly after the bill stalled
The agency actions have come in rapid succession. The SEC introduced an "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks and proposed new rules covering how investment advisers and funds can custody crypto. The CFTC, for its part, sent crypto-market rulemakings to the White House and floated a plan to bring crypto exchanges under federal oversight.
Taken together, those steps amount to the only kind of "clarity" regulators can offer the crypto sector while Congress remains absent.
Hill says regulatory relief is fragile by nature
Hill's point is that this kind of relief is not durable. Exemptions and guidance can be challenged in court or reversed by a future administration. A statute, by contrast, lasts.
A longtime crypto advocate who was tapped to lead the committee because of his focus on digital assets, Hill has repeatedly framed legislation as the industry's only path to lasting certainty.
The window he is counting on is narrow. A bill that failed to clear the Senate only weeks ago may or may not be revived before the end of the year. For now, Hill is not ready to leave the matter entirely in the hands of regulators.
