A group of U.S. financial regulators is set to meet on Monday, July 19 in a meeting announced today by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
The meeting will involve the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
The PWG is a committee that includes Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler, and the Acting Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Rostin Behnam.
The objective, as per today’s announcement, would be for the agencies to deliberate on how they can cooperate to regulate stablecoins. Secretary Yellen said:
Bringing together regulators will enable us to assess the potential benefits of stablecoins while mitigating risks they could pose to users, markets, or the financial system.
The meeting is a follow-up to a report on stablecoins released by the PGW in 2020 and will seek to provide a stepping stone for more regulatory clarity for private stablecoin issuers. PGW is expected to publish further recommendations in the coming months.
The meeting comes off the back of unprecedented growth in the value of mainstream digital assets and stablecoins, which often provide an avenue for crypto investors to access the dollar in the form of a token.
At the time of writing, three of the largest digital assets by market cap are all stablecoins, namely, Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and Binance (USD). These stablecoins boast a combined $100 billion market cap and will most probably continue to soar as the industry matures.
With the U.S. government teasing the rollout of a digital dollar, also known as central bank digital currency (CBDC), these existing stablecoins will be competitors, especially for mainstream payments. Only time will tell the impact that the incoming “regulation” of stablecoins will have on the crypto market.
