With January having arrived, the new Congress has convened. While at the time of writing, the House of Representatives is still struggling to elect or even nominate a republican speaker, we can rest assured that things are going to go quite well for crypto in the coming months and that the country is now well on its way towards garnering a small bit of healing from all the trouble it’s been through since Biden entered the fray.
Congress Needs to Stay Out of Crypto
One of the big things this new Congress is expected to vote on is crypto and stock trading amongst lawmakers. Congress has long been talking about such a maneuver, but it’s failed to really act on it, likely because one of the main reasons that members of Congress even get rich is because they are privy to stock information prior to members of the public.
With this knowledge, they can sell or buy before anyone else and add hefty sums to their portfolios. In many ways, this is insider trading, and if any everyday citizen was to take part in such activity, they would likely be arrested and jailed. Insider trading has always been a crime, and this serves as another clear example of the hypocrisy and jaded rules that cloud Washington.
But this time, there is genuine hope the new Congress will do the right thing and ensure that no regulator – whether they be a senator or a member of the House – be permitted to engage in either crypto or stock trades while they sit in office. They can trade items all they want, but they need to vacate their seats if they are going to take part in such activity.
Too Many Opportunities for Criminality
In 2022, the world of crypto came crashing down when it was announced that the space’s golden boy FTX was filing bankruptcy and that Sam Bankman-Fried was going to face trial for fraud. One of the scary points of this story is that SBF is alleged to have given donations to many politicians (primarily democrats) in the form of user funds. As it turns out, even after the arrest of SBF, many of these politicians have refused to say if they are going to give the money back.
This situation alone should be enough to convince incoming lawmakers that politics and crypto don’t go together. There is no way all these politicians – given their close ties to FTX and SBF – didn’t see what was going on with the exchange. This was clearly a mark of criminality in both the crypto space and in the U.S. government, and if lawmakers are to remain in power, they must focus less on using their power to get rich and more on assisting the people they were hired to serve.
