Representative Brad Sherman (a Democrat from Southern California), speaking at a recent congressional hearing on the demise of the FTX exchange and that of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, compared cryptocurrency to a “garden of snakes.” He fears that politicians will see the former CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, as the only “snake” in the cryptocurrency sector.
“My fear is that we will view Sam Bankman-Fried as just one big snake in the cryptographic Garden of Eden. The fact is, crypto is a garden of snakes.
The congressman from Southern California claims that the goal of cryptocurrency is to make “corporate billionaire bros” richer while challenging the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. According to Sherman, narcotics traffickers, sanction evaders, and other criminals are drawn to cryptocurrency. The congressman continues by saying that a significant market for the emerging asset class is tax avoidance.
“But the big market is tax evasion, and I know that there are some on the other side who cheer every time a billionaire escapes taxes,”
Sherman claims that Bankman-Fried lobbied to keep the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) out of cryptocurrency because he desired “baby regulation” from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), referring to the disgraced FTX founder as “Inmate 14372.”
The SEC as a whole has been at odds with a major fraction of the cryptocurrency industry because it maintains that many of the platforms for digital assets should be subject to registration, despite the claims of many of those companies that they are either not engaged in the securities industry or that the agency has not properly defined crypto securities.
Sherman is well-known for being one of Capitol Hill’s most ardent opponents of cryptocurrencies and has long advocated for a total ban on the technology. However, the lawmaker said recently that it was unlikely that the United States would outlaw cryptocurrency. He added that a complete prohibition was currently unattainable because the crypto lobby had grown too strong.
