Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Rostin Behnam is looking to members of Congress to address the Commission’s lack of enforcement authority in the digital asset space.
At a Wednesday hearing titled “Examining Digital Assets: Risks, Regulation, and Innovation,” Behnam told lawmakers with the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry that the CFTC’s authority was currently limited to addressing fraud and themanipulation of digital assets without a clear regulatory framework. The CFTC chair added that because there was currently a patchwork of regulation and enforcement authority across multiple government agencies, the bulk of the agency’s actions taken in the last seven years “have largely relied on tips and whistleblowers” who brought crypto scams and other illicit activities to the CFTC’s attention.