Following on from his celebrity appearance at Washington hearings in February 2018, Christopher Giancarlo has again presented as a pensive voice on the issue of classifying crypto assets. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman also pointed to the difficulty in classifying cryptocurrencies, depending on which one of the many regulatory agencies it came from.

Agencies like the SEC, CFTC and many others are governed by rules that were formulated some decades ago and each has a different focus. Giancarlo had previously pointed to this dilemma when he first spoke to the Senate commission earlier in 2018.

Bitcoin in all of its colourful splendor is the product of only nine years standing. Dealing with such an unimagined and unorthodox asset while running with protocols established in the 1930s, as both the Securities and Exchange Commission and CFTC do, makes dealing with digital assets difficult.

Bitcoin a Mixed Bag for Giancarlo

Giancarlo said that Bitcoin has “… elements of all of the different asset classes.” He said that Bitcoin and many other digital coins are actually composed of many snippets of the other different asset classes. This is apparent from whether they are employed to make payments or held as a long-term asset.

He did say that he felt Bitcoin to most effectively employed as a long-term asset, better to HODL than employed as a transactional currency. Giancarlo was widely feted by enthusiasts after his appearance before an investigating Senate commission that was calling for qualified opinions on the emergence of cryptocurrencies. For his cautiously positive words at the time, he became an overnight Twitter celebrity, with many millennials among those cheering the 58-year old regulator.

At the time, there was still raw trepidation over what global regulations might amount to enthusiasts, and Giancarlo emerged as a singular hero of the movement after his words to the commission in February. As to whether Bitcoin is a currency or a security, he said that within the current, still-evolving Bitcoin ecosystem, the coin was part security, part currency and part digital coin. “We see elements of commodity in it that are subject to our regulations,” he noted, again pointing to the varying focus of different agencies, “ but depending on which regulatory regime you’re looking at, it has different aspects of all of that.”

Giancarlo also noted that from some angles, Bitcoin almost looked like a more traditional asset, gold. Likening Bitcoin to the precious metal, he qualified his commentary, saying “Only it’s virtual. It’s digital.”

Giancarlo No Patsy

Christopher Giancarlo may be a wildly popular voice from within the formal sector’s regulatory ranks, but he is also capable of calling anything irregular, as he did at the same hearings, saying much about his concern for consumer protection. Worried that a lot of illicit activity was being enabled by cryptocurrencies, the CFTC chief had said at the time that the overwhelming interest shown by retail investors and the subsequent possibility of fraud and swindling alarmed regulators.

Interviewed by CNBC, Giancarlo was speaking live from Los Angeles’ annual Milken Conference. “At the end of the day,” he concluded, “it’s for Congress, and not regulators, to decide whether new policies should be evolved for these new asset classes,” Bitcoin closed at $8.975.77 May 1, 2018, somewhat down from the previous day’s trading.

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