US Representative Confirms There Will Be No Stablecoin Regulations Soon

Congressman Jim Himes of the United States has said that the long-awaited regulatory framework for stablecoins would not be proposed anytime soon.

Legislators in the United States seem to have more pressing concerns, while stablecoin and cryptocurrency rules stay on the back burner. Representative Jim Himes said on October 18 at a finance conference that the measure would not pass this Congress due to forthcoming elections.

“It’s probably not happening in early 2023,” Himes said as frustrations mount in the U.S. over a lack of clarity for crypto assets.

With a report from the Financial Stability Oversight Council earlier this month urging interagency collaboration, the Biden administration has encouraged Congress to go forward with crypto laws.

However, it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

Remarkable Progress

Himes remarked on what he saw as amazing development over the preceding five years.

“Four years ago if you said Bitcoin, crypto and DeFi in the halls of Congress, nobody would have known what you were talking about. The progress that has been made in Congress is pretty remarkable.”

However, governments and bankers have only paid attention to cryptocurrency since markets have increased by around 400% over the previous four years, excluding the November high.

Himes, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, has spent months developing a stablecoin law with his colleagues, but there are still significant disagreements on how they should be regulated.

Congress needs to get significant about “updating statutes that allow the regulators to do their work,” he argued. “If the regulators continue to do what they’re doing right now, which is sort of extrapolating or regulating by analogy, that opens up the court challenges,” he said, possibly in reference to the ongoing battle between Ripple and the SEC over the fogged issue of securities sales.

Bill Lummis-Gillibrand Gains Momentum

The crypto and stablecoin regulatory measure presented by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis, according to Himes, is “getting momentum.”

This would be beneficial for the cryptocurrency business, which favours monitoring by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (SEC). Under this legislation, crypto assets are more likely to be classified as commodities as opposed to securities, which are subject to significantly stricter rules.

Lummis anticipates that the law will not reach the President’s desk for a minimum of six months, regardless of the outcome.