Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Rostin Behnam said on Wednesday that oversight of regulations under the CFTC could have significant benefits for the cryptocurrency sector, including a potential rise in the price of Bitcoin. .

“Growth could happen if we have a well-regulated space. Bitcoin could double in price if there is a CFTC-regulated market,” Behnam told attendees during a fireside chat at NYU Law School.

Behnam said that a clear regulatory framework could pave the way for institutional investors to enter the market.

“These established institutions in the crypto space see a huge opportunity for institutional inflows that will only happen if there is a regulatory structure in place around these markets. [crypto] Institutions thrive on regulation, they thrive on regulatory certainty, and they thrive on equal terms. And they can say otherwise,” Behnam explained.

Behnam stated that he supports the bipartisan bill introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee leaders, which would give the CFTC the primary regulator of the crypto industry.

The executive also supported a provision in the bill that allows the cash-strapped agency to charge fees to regulated institutions. Behnam sees these fundraising efforts as crucial for the CFTC to tackle the challenge of regulating the cryptocurrency industry. The executive noted that the agency’s small operating budget has affected its ability to effectively deal with crypto crimes.

A bipartisan bill recently sponsored by the Senate Agriculture Committee supports the need to give the CFTC “exclusive jurisdiction” over commodity-compliant cryptocurrency transactions, but not over anything that might be of value. .

The crypto industry has been pushing for a federal agency or Congress to create a clear definition of “digital commodity” or digital security, which could give companies greater clarity on when and how they must register with the CFTC or the SEC (the US Stock Exchange). and Exchange Commission).

The bill seeks to give crypto oversight to the CFTC, which the crypto industry views as friendlier than the SEC. By giving primary responsibility for cryptocurrency oversight to the CFTC, the bill sidesteps the SEC, whose chairman Gary Gensler has taken aggressive action against crypto interests.

Gensler considers most of the roughly $1.2 trillion digital assets in the market to qualify as securities, similar to shares in publicly traded companies, giving his agency responsibility for overseeing them and their issuers. But the bipartisan bill rejects such a claim, calling most digital assets much more akin to commodities than securities.

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