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REGULATORS RUNNING WILD? SENATE STAFFER SAYS SEC INVESTIGATING EVERY U.S. CRYPTO EXCHANGE
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been bogged down for years in a head-numbing lawsuit against Ripple Networks and XRP, technology which could bring the SWIFT system out of the stone age.
But the latest SEC news promises even more misguided absurdity. According to a Forbes magazine report, a staffer for Senator Cynthia Lummis is claiming that the federal agency has open investigations on virtually every crypto exchange operating in the U.S., as well as Binance (separate from Binance US), which doesn’t operate stateside.
That would include at least 40 exchanges.
The staffer was not named in the story. But a senior executive of a major crypto exchange, speaking on background, seemed to corroborate the staffer’s contention.
The executive said that many U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges have probably gotten Wells Notices, based on chatter he has heard from SEC contacts, the Forbes story revealed. Such notices are used to legally alert firms when an action is going to be launched against them.
Several Crypto Bills Sponsored, But None Likely to Pass Before Election Season
Senator Lummis has been actively involved in trying to hammer out consensus on crypto regulations that would provide clarity to the industry, while not stifling innovation and opportunities the technology holds.
Lummis co-sponsored the “Responsible Financial Innovation Act” with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), which encompassed a significant regulatory framework for digital assets.
And this past week, another set of bipartisan legislators introduced a “Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act of 2022” that notably would empower the CFTC to regulate digital commodities.
The SEC and CFTC have recently been involved in interagency turf battles over crypto regulatory actions.
The Lummis staffer said it was unlikely that the Senator’s co-sponsored bill, or the bill introduced this week, would be acted on before the end of the year, according to the Forbes story.
A bill which contained provisions to allow banks to issue their own stablecoins probably had the best chance of passing in the near term, in the staffer’s view.
REAL ESTATE BLOCKCHAIN TRANSFORMATION ONLY A MATTER OF TIME
Commercial Real Estate executives are finding that blockchain-based smart contracts can play a much larger role in their industry, according to a new Deloitte business intelligence report.
The report list six use case areas where blockchain powered innovations will likely impact the real estate industry:
- Improve property search process
- Expedite pre-lease due diligence
- Ease leasing and subsequent property and cash flow management
- Enable smarter decision-making
- Transparent and relatively cheaper property title management
- Enable more efficient processing of financing and payments
Deloitte, currently in the top five of privately owned companies in the U.S., provides professional business services to clients, including audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and legal services.
Which Blockchains Are Positioned To Innovate in Real Estate?
The new Deloitte report is only the latest to identify the trend of real estate processes that are being targeted by blockchain solutions. A Consensys analysis detailed various aspects of real estate that would benefit by adopting blockchain innovations, including Project Financing, Loan and Mortgage Securitization, Land and Property Registries, Investor and Tenant Identity, Payments and Leasing, and other areas.
To give one example, Consensys noted that Land and Property Registries could be effectively secured in a digital way via blockchain technology:
“Blockchain replaces outdated paper deeds with true digital assets and tracks changes on an immutable ledger that acts as a secure shared source of truth for documents between multiple parties and organizations. Ethereum enables transaction and property ownership records to be more accessible— facilitating market transactions, increasing investor confidence, unlocking access to finance, and promoting economic and social community development. Sweden’s land registry authority, Lantmäteriet, along with banks and industry players, have a fully-functioning blockchain-based digital land register platform.”
Consensys specifically mentioned Ethereum as a network with smart contract and tokenization functionality that was likely to be a blockchain used to build real estate industry solutions.
But other networks competing with Ethereum in tokenization and smart contract functionality, are also likely to gain from the transformation already impacting the industry.
The new Deloitte report can be found here.
The Trends Journal has been tracking utility use cases for cryptos including real estate innovations, in articles such as “ONE OF A KIND: THE WORLD OF NFTs” (10 Aug 2021), “THE CRYPTO ‘AGE OF UTILITY’ HAS JUST BEGUN” (12 Oct 2021) and “REAL ESTATE NFT INVESTING PLATFORMS ON THE BLOCKCHAIN” (22 Mar 2022).