Cryptocurrency businesses, from top executives to individual holders, like to credit Donald Trump's surprise victory in November's presidential election with a margin of victory.
Mr. Trump, of course, has used cryptocurrencies for votes and money, and has promised lighter regulatory measures than those imposed by Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Gary Gensler.
Whether it's true that cryptocurrencies gave Trump a landslide victory is another question, but crypto leaders say cryptocurrencies have brought team Trump tens of millions of dollars and new voters in return. I'm looking for.
That's why so many of them are being looked down upon at Mar-a-Lago these days, as President Trump prepares to take over the White House on Monday.
One of the big challenges, On The Money learned, is that companies will no longer have to deal with the heavy-handed regulation of the SEC, also known as Wall Street's top police.
That won't happen, according to the person most recently involved in the federal government's regulatory machinery. Former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry said in a fireside chat I moderated Tuesday for private financial firm Biz2Credit that the SEC isn't really going anywhere.
The SEC and its new chairman, Trump nominee Paul Atkins, are far from the Bit players the cryptocurrency variety has claimed to be, and they still largely dominate the $3.5 trillion digital coin market.
And McHenry said the industry's preferred regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will not take over all crypto regulation with lighter powers.
The reason, he said, is a law dating back to the Great Depression. Under securities laws, Bitcoin is not used as part of a service to build the blockchain technology used to conduct the transactions underlying digital coins, including disclosures to investors. It is not subject to SEC oversight.
The same is not true for the sale of other cryptocurrencies to fund new blockchain platforms. They will have to navigate SEC regulatory and disclosure challenges.
“When you raise capital in the United States, the capital raising is done through securities laws,” McHenry said. “So what’s native to the SEC…that doesn’t change.”
