Investing.com – The rapidly growing cryptocurrency market has worried the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for some time. It lacks a globally uniform regulatory framework that protects people against criminal acts and the established payment system against contagion in the event of an industry crash.
The international organization believes that the resulting risk is so high that it is asking local regulatory authorities to act immediately. Early regulatory efforts are expected to include hosted wallets, decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and financial institutions’ engagement in cryptocurrencies.
Stablecoins are considered a particularly hot topic, as they are systemically important in certain areas of the crypto industry and the spillover effects on the traditional financial sector must also be considered. The biggest problem in this regard is uniform legal certainty globally, as many countries adopt different regulatory measures.
In July, the EU adopted the MiCA, a regulatory framework that governs both reserve requirements and the custody and liquidation of stablecoin issuers. However, this framework only concerns issuers that are legal persons within the EU. The established rules therefore do not apply to , , or many other stablecoins, as these are operated outside the EU.
In the United States, the focus is currently on the Lummis-Gillibrand Act, which mainly deals with determining which of the regulatory authorities is responsible for which crypto sector. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) considers itself competent for almost all cryptocurrencies, with the exception of , because only the latter is in its eyes a trading product under the jurisdiction of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). ).
From the IMF’s point of view, it has also not been possible to adopt a sufficient regulatory framework in Great Britain.
The IMF therefore strongly recommends accelerating national efforts and setting up cross-border cooperation between regulatory authorities as soon as possible. In addition, the rapid evolution of this sector means that the laws adopted must be continuously adapted to new developments:
“Regulators need to continuously monitor the crypto-asset landscape to understand the direction of industry developments.”
By Marco Oehrl