In a Feb. 14 hearing at the Senate Banking Committee titled ‘Crypto Crash: Why Financial System Safeguards are Needed for Digital Assets’, ranking member Tim Scott said Gensler should appear before Congress before September to address additional enforcement actions in the crypto space, calling out the SEC chair for doing “rounds on the morning talk shows” rather than testifying. 

“To think the SEC has failed to take any meaningful preemptive action to ensure this type of catastrophic failure does not happen again,” said Scott. “If they have the tools they need, were they just asleep at the wheel? [...] We’d be happy to have chairman Gensler testify sooner — much sooner — than later.”

Crypto Council for Innovation chief global regulatory officer and general counsel Linda Jeng testified that the lack of a consistent federal regulatory framework on crypto contributed to a lack of investor protection and uncertainty among firms:

“The SEC has not initiated any formal rulemaking process to update securities laws that are decades old to account for the unique attributes of digital assets that are determined to be securities.”

Vanderbilt University law professor Yesha Yadav echoed some of Jeng’s concerns on developing a federal framework for crypto, but also proposed a self-regulatory regime in which exchanges could oversee themselves as a complement to public regulation. Firms that failed to comply with the rules could be forced to pay financial penalties.