Crypto Is Not A Viable Long-Term Form Of Private Money And Stablecoins Are Equivalent To Casino Poker Chips, Says SEC Chief | Currency News | Financial and business news

• The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, has compared stablecoins to “poker chips”.
• Gensler went back to its previous analogy by calling the $ 2 trillion cryptocurrency market a “Wild West.”
• The SEC is working on a stable coin report under the direction of Secretary of the Treasury Yellen.
• See more stories on the Insider business page.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler compared stablecoins to ‘poker chips’ in an interview with the Washington Post, reverting to his previous analogy of the $ 2 trillion cryptocurrency market. of dollars like the “Wild West”.

He also said private forms of money have proven unsustainable, suggesting that thousands of such projects will not last.

Stablecoins “act almost like poker chips in the casino right now,” Gensler said in an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. “We have a lot of casinos here in the Old West and poker chips are those stablecoins… at the casino gaming tables.”

Gensler, in a speech in early August, said the digital asset market looks like the “Wild West,” in the absence of strong investor protection. He called on lawmakers to give the SEC more authority to regulate the industry.

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency linked to fiat currencies such as the US dollar and backed by traditional assets such as short-term government bonds. Among the largest stablecoins, Tether was valued at around $ 68 billion and USD Coin had a market cap of nearly $ 30 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Gensler did not name any stable parts in the interview.

The SEC is preparing a report on stablecoins under the direction of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Gensler said, adding that working with Congress “would help” regulate stablecoins.

The interview was released after Gensler told the Senate Banking Committee last week that cryptocurrency exchanges must register with the agency because some of their tokens or products may be securities.

“These platforms should come in, they should figure out how to sign up, be an investment – an investor protection mission,” Gensler told the Washington Post.

The regulator said there are examples of experimentation with private forms of money in the United States, including the Wildcat banking era between the 1830s and 1860s, when banks issued their own notes and competed against each other.

“Private funds usually don’t last that long. So I don’t think there is long term viability for 5,000 or 6,000 private forms of money. History tells us otherwise,” a- he declared. “So in the meantime, I think it’s worth having an investor protection regime around this.”