Biden halts Trump administration’s controversial crypto bill

President Biden has temporarily halted all government bills, including a controversial FinCEN crypto law.

On his first day as the new US president, Joe Biden stopped several planned bills, including the controversial law regulating so-called self-managed crypto wallets, which was introduced by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin shortly before the end of the Trump administration.

This emerges from an official memorandum from the White House addressed to several federal agencies, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which reports to the Treasury Department and which submitted the relevant bill.

The crypto industry welcomes this step, including crypto lawyer Jake Chervinsky, who works as general counsel for compound finance and writes :

“We fought hard and deserved to take a deep breath. Janet Yellen is not Steven Mnuchin. I am optimistic. “

The bill in question was submitted on December 18 by FinCEN under the aegis of Finance Minister Mnuchin . If the law were to be passed, banks and financial service providers would be obliged to collect, store and pass on the data of customers who interact with private crypto wallets.

The draft was therefore heavily criticized by the crypto industry and parts of the financial industry , including Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, who is also the managing director of the large American payment service provider Square. Dorsey thinks that this information should not be obtained for cryptocurrencies, as this is also not collected for transactions in local currencies.

In addition, the critics counter that for many crypto projects it is almost impossible to obtain such information, since automatically processed smart contracts do not record this data

President Joe Biden has appointed Janet Yellen as the new Treasury Secretary, but she has already dampened the joy of the crypto industry at the departure of Mnuchin by saying this week that cryptocurrencies are used „primarily for illegal activities“. Nevertheless, crypto lawyer Chervinsky sees the change of office as positive:

“First, everyone is better than Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who hates crypto with body and soul. Second, although Dr. Yellen is not yet a crypto fan, I assume that she is open minded, will listen and will take into account the provisions of the law. That’s good. „

Biden has also made Gary Gensler the new head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The former chairman of the supervisory authority for derivatives trading is considered open-minded towards digitization and blockchain .