Christopher Giancarlo, Chairman of the United States Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), revealed in an FT report over the weekend that his agency has already held talks with Facebook, regarding the company’s proposed stablecoin cryptocurrency dubbed GlobalCoin.
However, the discussion with Facebook was “very early stages of conversations” according to the CFTC Chair who further confirmed that the goal was to discover whether the stablecoin planned by Facebook would come under the agency’s regulatory purview.
Speaking on the scope of what is known so far about the cryptocurrency’s design and the fact that it could be pegged to the U.S Dollar, the top official hinted that the CFTC might not be the right regulatory body to oversee the project.
The CFTC focuses on commodities that have varying prices and thus could use a derivatives product.
“We’re very interested in understanding it better,” Giancarlo said in the report, before noting that Facebook has not submitted an application for the proposed cryptocurrency.
Regarding the issue of Facebook applying, the FT quotes Giancarlo as saying,
“We can only act on an application, we don’t have anything in front of us.”
Regulators Prying Into Facebook’s Crypto Plan
Notably, the CFTC Chairman’s comment regarding Facebook’s cryptocurrency has come a few weeks after the U.S Senate Banking Committee sent a letter asking the social media company to share more details regarding it proposed cryptocurrency.
The Committee wanted to want to know what regulatory compliance measures Facebook is taking with regards to the cryptocurrency, and it seems Mark Zuckerberg and co understand the implications and are trying to sort things out before the possible launch date rumored to be Q1 2020.
In the end, a widely used cryptocurrency distributed via a social media platform to over 2 billion users in several countries would have a lot of regulatory compliance issues tied to it. Hopefully, though, these compliance issues will not stand in the way of the release of one of the most awaited products in the crypto industry right now.
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