Christopher Giancarlo to Testify Before Congress on Crypto Currency Today

Christopher Giancarlo, head of the CFTC, will testify before Congress at 10am to discuss crypto currency market today. The written testimonies can be viewed here.

Several takes from the written testimonies:

On distributed ledger technology (DLT). 

........In fact, one study estimates that DLT could eventually allow financial institutions to save as much as $20 billion in infrastructure and operational costs each year.27  Another study reportedly estimates that blockchain could cut trading settlement costs by a third, or $16 billion a year, and cut capital requirements by $120 billion........

........If regulators in 2008 could have viewed a real-time distributed ledger (or a series of aggregated ledgers across asset classes) and, perhaps, been able to utilize modern cognitive computing capabilities, they may have been able to recognize anomalies in market-wide trading activity and diverging counterparty exposures indicating heightened risk of bank failure....

On current crypto market size and on comparison to gold

.....As of the morning of February 5, the total value of all outstanding Bitcoin was about $130 billion based on a Bitcoin price of $7,700. The Bitcoin “market capitalization” is less than the stock market capitalization of a single “large cap” business, such as McDonalds (around $130 billion). The total value of all outstanding virtual currencies was about $365 billion. Because virtual currencies like Bitcoin are sometimes considered to be comparable to gold as an investment vehicle, it is important to recognize that the total value of all the gold in the world is estimated by the World Gold Council to be about $8 trillion which continues to dwarf the virtual currency market size.....

On cryptocurrency trading platforms in US

 A key issue before market regulators is whether our historic approach to the regulation of currency transactions is appropriate for the cryptocurrency markets. Check-cashing and money-transmission services that operate in the U.S. are primarily state-regulated. Many of the internet-based cryptocurrency trading platforms have registered as payment services and are not subject to direct oversight by the SEC or the CFTC. We would support policy efforts to revisit these frameworks and ensure they are effective and efficient for the digital era.