Sherman said a task force or committee to help and safeguard investors won’t function as long as naïve investors buy meme crypto coins.
Congressman from the United States and well-known cryptocurrency critic Brad Sherman has asserted that outright banning cryptocurrencies are not a possibility at this time.
The Northridge-area Democrat told the LA Times that the cryptocurrency sector has grown pretty formidable over time. The politician’s high capital contributions and effective crypto lobbying, he continued, prevent them from enacting a broad prohibition. He clarified:
“We didn’t ban it at the beginning because we didn’t realize it was important, and we didn’t ban it now because there’s too much money and power behind it.
A well-known skeptic, the democratic congressman has been calling for a crypto prohibition since 2019. Sherman used to support a ban, but now, almost three years later, he supports regulation of the cryptocurrency market.
The U.S. representative is particularly concerned for small and retail investors who frequently fall victim to duplicitous frauds, but he acknowledged that no matter how hard the judiciary tries to safeguard investors, nothing will happen unless people continue to invest in cryptocurrencies like meme coins. He stated:
“It is hard to be running the subcommittee dedicated to investor protection in a country in which people want to wager on [meme coins].”
Sherman argued in favor of bringing cryptocurrency within the Securities and Exchange Commission’s purview (SEC). He lambasted the same committee earlier this year in July for not going after the major cryptocurrency exchanges.
Legislators in the United States have long pushed regulatory agencies to include the developing crypto market in the legal framework. On how the cryptocurrency market should be governed, there has been a significant difference in opinion.
Sherman and a sizable majority of lawmakers support strong regulatory guidelines that crypto advocates feel would impede decentralization. One such example that was backed by people like Sherman was the ban on Tornado Cash. On the other side, pro-crypto legislation has long been fought for by American lawmakers like Hester Peirce and Cynthia Lummis.
