White House agrees to crypto regulations amid Trump family's major digital currency profits

[00:00:00]A cryptocurrency bill is facing a final push in the Senate and the White House just agreed to the addition of an ethics provision sought by Democrats. The Trump administration has been extremely friendly to the cryptocurrency industry and the president's family has profited off crypto ventures since returning to office. Here to discuss is The Hill's business and technology reporter Julia Shapiro. Hey Julia, so what is this cryptocurrency regulation bill and what are the chances that it's going to end up passing the Senate?

[00:00:29]>> Yeah, so it is known as the Clarity Act and the idea behind it is to create a regulatory framework for the crypto industry. Specifically, there has been this issue over who is supposed to regulate what within this new industry and you have two major financial regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission or the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or the CFTC.

[00:00:51]And so the central goal of this bill is to kind of draw a bright line over who has jurisdiction over what in this industry.

[00:01:00]>> And Democrats have been pushing for this ethics provision. What exactly is that?

[00:01:06]>> Yeah, they have long been pushing for a provision that would essentially prevent elected officials, including the president, from profiting off of the crypto industry.

[00:01:17]Um what we understand is in the ethics agreement that the um White House has, you know, agreed to with Senate Republicans is a uh provision that would bar officials from issuing or offering crypto and it would be enforced by the DOJ. Now, that is a bit of a point of contention because Democrats don't um necessarily want the DOJ to be the one in charge of enforcing it. There had previously been discussion about state attorney generals enforcing this measure. So, it's unclear whether Democrats are going to get on board at this point.

[00:01:54]>> And how are How have companies viewing this bill? Have they been out in support or opposition to it?

[00:01:59]>> The >> The crypto companies are pretty in support of this bill at this point. You know, I think that there's been a lot of negotiations and so far they seem happy with how the bill has ended up. It's still there's some final negotiations coming down to the wire on this. So, if things change we we could see them withdraw support in certain areas, but it just depends on how those final issues shake out.

[00:02:21]>> There have been reports that the president's family has made over a billion dollars from crypto ventures since the beginning of his second term. How would this ethics provision impact this president and his family or future presidents if they're involved in the industry?

[00:02:36]>> So, it's still a little bit unclear. The details are still coming out. We've heard about what is meant to be in this provision, but most people have not seen the text yet. I think we're still waiting for that to come out. So, how it actually would impact the president has yet to be seen. We haven't heard anything yet about it impacting, you know, elected officials' families. So, that was a concern of Democrats and something that they were interested in and I think that, you know, the issue of the financial disclosures which showed more than a billion in earnings for President Trump from cryptocurrency ventures has really reignited this issue and made it a very big concern for Democrats going forward.

[00:03:17]>> What are you going to keep an eye on aside from obviously the text of the bill which everybody's watching for?

[00:03:21]What are you going to be keeping an eye on as this kind of makes its way through Congress?

[00:03:25]>> I think the big thing to watch are there's about 12 Democrats who would be considered crypto friendly and so they are probably the potential votes that Republicans could get to move this bill forward. They need at least seven Democrats in order to get this thing across the finish line and so the big thing to watch is whether they indicate that the ethics provision specifically as well as the rest of the text is, you know up to their liking. So that's that's the big thing to watch in the next few weeks.

[00:03:56]>> All right, we'll leave it at that. Julia Shapira business and technology reporter here at The Hill. Thanks so much for your insight.

[00:04:01]>> Thanks for having me.