May 11, 2023

Committee members of the Democratic Party have reportedly received a memo prior to this week's hearing on digital assets regulation that supposedly supports the SEC's position toward crypto assets, which some of the people within the crypto community believe are instructions rooted in an attempt to "kill crypto and Bitcoin." Wayne Vaughan, the CEO of the global blockchain platform Tierion, thinks that the "Democrats are trying to kill crypto and Bitcoin" after he saw the leaked memo, which was shared on Twitter by Fox Business journalist Eleanor Terrett. The memo, as pointed out by Terrett, who shares interesting information related to the nascent cryptocurrency industry, was circulated among Democrat committee members prior to the joint meeting between several U.S. House Committees, including House Financial Services Committee and House Agriculture Committee, which took place Wednesday. Among the "key messages" highlighted in the supposed note to the party's Congressmen included the reminder that all crypto assets, just like what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Gary Gensler previously said, are securities. The House Committee is also expected to support the financial watchdog's stance on everything that involves crypto regulation. "It contained "key messages" for the @FSCDems to stick to including supporting the @SECGov's total authority over crypto regulation, its assertion that nearly all cryptos constitute securities, and that crypto's problem isn't ambiguity, it's mass non-compliance," Terret tweeted. "The messaging also asserts that Committee Republicans who are looking to cut the budgets of financial regulators are not actually serious about protecting investors and should, instead, focus on passing a clean debt ceiling bill, not on pro-crypto legislation," the journalist's tweet read. Democrats are trying to kill crypto and Bitcoin. Sad. https://t.co/MkHkn1QCma Moreover, the memo notes that "under Chair Gensler, the SEC has built up the strongest enforcement team yet to go after crypto criminals and protect investors and consumers from harm." Further, it underlines that Republicans intend to tie the hands of the financial regulator and "want to reverse [the] curse." "Unfortunately, Committee Republicans want to reverse course and tie the hands of the SEC. The SEC must continue to lead the regulation of the U.S. crypto market, and Congress must do its part to provide them with the resources they need," the memo claims, labeling members of the other political party's move as "a partisan pursuit of sweeping digital assets legislation that erects entirely new legal frameworks for the crypto industry when neither the Biden Administration, investors, the SEC, nor other financial regulators have called on Congress to do so." The leaked memo may have swayed the price of Bitcoin, the world's largest crypto asset by market capitalization, to trade in the red zone. As of 1:10 a.m. ET, BTC was trading down 0.81% at $27,494.45 with a 24-hour volume of $22,119,337,098, based on the latest data from CoinMarketCap. Democrats only have a narrow hold on Congress, where Biden is battling to get major spending packages passedAFP / Daniel SLIM Read more