What to know:
- Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told attendees at the D.C. Blockchain Summit on Wednesday that Congress could potentially pass long-awaited stablecoin legislation before the Easter recess.
- Gillibrand warned the industry against pushing for a "watered down" version of the bill, stressing that stringent regulations were necessary to protect consumers and attract investors.
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), one of the leading Democrats supporting crypto legislation, warned the industry against pushing for a “watered-down” version of the long-awaited stablecoin legislation currently moving through the Senate, arguing that stringent regulations are necessary to foster innovation and protect investors from bank runs like the one on Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in 2022.
Speaking at the D.C. Blockchain Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, Gillibrand said that the bipartisan stablecoin bill — Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) — creates a number of protections for consumers in the event of an issuer bankruptcy scenario.
“You have to think through all the ways this can go wrong. Something as simple as how you define a dollar — is a Treasury the same as a dollar? What happens if your 1-to-1 backing is all in Treasuries and you have an interest rate misalignment like SVB just did, and you have a run on your stablecoin and all your dollar-to-dollar backing is in a three-month Treasury that you can’t get out of – that’s a run on your stablecoin, that’s a collapse,” Gillibrand said.
If dollar-backing requirements are not met or enforced, Gillibrand said: “You’ll just have another FTX. You’ll just have another algorithmic stablecoin that plunges because it never really made sense. That is a huge problem for the U.S. market.”
“The worst thing we could do is water it down,” Gillibrand said. “Do not think that a watered-down bill will help your industry. It will destroy your industry. Because one more SVB, one more algorithmic stablecoin [collapse], just continues to create such uncertainty that nobody wants to do business in the United States.”
After years of false starts, stablecoin legislation appears to finally be gaining momentum. Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee voted to advance the GENIUS Act to a Senate-wide vote. A similar bill from the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to go public on Wednesday.
Gillibrand said that if Congress is able to get the GENIUS Act signed into law, it is then more likely to be able to make progress on a market structure bill.