US Sen. Pat Toomey Tables Stablecoin Trust Act

Within a week of giving his goodbye statement on the hallway of the U.S. Senate, retiring Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey discreetly presented a new bitcoin bill. The Stablecoin TRUST Act — an acronym for Transparency of Reserves and Uniform Safe Transactions — would create a federal legislative structure for “payment stablecoins” and is intended to steer Congress in the direction of “reasonable regulation of digital currencies.”

The measure is nearly identical to The TRUST Act, which Toomey proposed in April, and is the most recent and presumably final bill related to crypto assets that Sen. Toomey presented or cosponsored during the previous term.

“I trust that this approach creates the basis for my workmates to implement laws next year protecting client finances without impeding development,” the author writes “In a news statement, he stated. “This measure would also guarantee that the Federal Reserve, which has shown substantial scepticism about stablecoins, will be unable to halt this conduct.”

Sen. Toomey’s plan would also remove the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission from stablecoin regulation (CFTC). The Stablecoin TRUST Act would ban “payment stablecoins” from being classified as securities and exempt their issuance from regulation as investment counsellors or investment businesses.

In its place, the proposal would establish a new federal permit for “payment stablecoin issuers” that would be administered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the body responsible for regulating conventional banks and savings organisations. Toomey is optimistic about the capability of stablecoins to revolutionise current financial activities in real life.

“By digitising the U.S. dollar and making it accessible on a worldwide, immediate, and and almost cost-free grounds, stablecoins could be broadly utilized throughout the physical economic system in a plethora of methods,” he stated in the recent release, reflecting his perspective for the proposal presented in April, wherein he highlighted that “while stablecoins enable trading with digital currencies presently, they could be broadly utilized throughout the physical economy in the years ahead.”

The legislation will unify public records standards for issuers, such as the stablecoin’s backing assets, that must be “high-quality liquid assets.” For investors, discretion would be of the utmost importance, omitting “technological advances such as digital assets” from Bank Secrecy Act restrictions and stating that “private trades not engaging a financial company are not required to be recorded.”

The Stablecoin Trust Act is cosponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren and Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis and North Carolina Republican Thomas Tills. Sen. Toomey cautioned his congressional workmates the week before, when he supported the voices of legislators demanding for cryptocurrency regulation in the aftermath of the fall of FTX, that the debacle was not caused by the presence of cryptocurrency, but rather by the incompetent or deceitful handling of cryptoassets.

“The improper conduct that happened here isn’t unique to the underlying asset; what seems to have transpired here is a total breakdown in the management of these assets,” he stated in scripted comments. “I hope that in our debate of FTX today, we can distinguish between possibly unlawful activities and completely legal and creative coins.”

Also skeptical of SEC commissioner Gary Gensler, Senator Toomey lately disagreed with the regulator’s conclusion that cryptos are securities. Moreover, he has initiated and cosponsored several crypto-related legislation, including the Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act. Back in October 2020, the senator revealed his intention to leave the Congress.