President Biden picks crypto expert to head SEC

Even with everything that took place all over the world in 2020, perhaps the biggest news story came in towards the end of the year, with the US Presidential election. Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump meant that an incumbent lost the election for the first time in around 30 years, but this brought a huge sigh of relief to many millions of people, both in the USA as well as in the rest of the world. Biden is expected to take a very different approach to governance and policies than Trump and has already started undoing some of his predecessor’s most harmful work. While those policies and programs will come under the spotlight in due course, there are also a lot of important appointments that Biden is making which will help shape the way government policies in various industries evolve over the next few years, and the financial sector is one such industry.

President Joe Biden has made some interesting picks for various jobs already. For example, former Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen has been tapped to become the next Treasury Secretary, while most people believe that the head of his transition team for the Fed, Banking and Securities Regulators Group, Gary Gensler, will be put in place eventually to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial market regulator in the USA. If this does come to pass, one sector which will be extremely happy is the cryptocurrency sector in the United States. Gensler has been teaching a course on cryptocurrencies and blockchain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is therefore thought to be quite friendly towards the sector. He has experience in regulation, having been the head of the CFTC under President Barack Obama, and has faced lobbying from banks and financial institutions in the past, when he introduced strong regulations on the $400 trillion swap market in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Thus, Gensler’s appointment to this job should be good news for the market as a whole, while his experience in the crypto space will be a boost to those in the sector.

This appointment will come at a crucial time for the crypto space, as we are seeing more and more people show interest in cryptocurrencies after the stunning rise in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies over the last 12 months. There have been quite a few industries that have begun to look at cryptocurrencies and blockchain as providing solutions for various problems, and the online gambling sector has been at the forefront of this. Various online casino sites have begun offering users the chance to place bets via cryptocurrencies, while transactions that are supported by blockchain are a lot more transparent, secure and quick, further increasing their attractiveness for customers. Сrypto online casino Winz.io, for example, would have seen a lot of increase in traffic over the last year as a result, and thus effective regulation of this space is important to protect users and lay down rules for operation.

At the moment, digital currencies are regulated by the CFTC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) at a federal level in the United States. Crypto holders also have to pay federal capital gains taxes on their holdings due to the tax policies of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). All of these rules and laws would be up for review so that a unified system of regulations is created to deal with cryptocurrencies, and the hope is that Gensler’s team is favorable towards the crypto space, recognizing the potential it has while also taking steps to ensure that users are protected against fraud.