His remarks come as the government continues to weigh its options on regulation.
An outright ban on stablecoins in the U.S. would be “sad” and affect the usability of crypto platforms, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has said.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg, he also admitted that Solana’s high-profile outage last week was “frustrating” — but said pushing the limits of blockchain infrastructure is crucial to ensure that they can one day scale up and support large protocols.
Solana was unable to process transactions for about 17 hours last week after a surge in demand peaked at about 400,000 transactions per second. That’s substantially more than the maximum capacity of 50,000 TPS that the project claims to offer.
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Stablecoin Clampdown Ahead?
As reported by CoinMarketCap Academy last week, there is growing speculation that the U.S. Treasury Department is planning to take action against stablecoins — amid concerns that they could threaten financial stability.
On Friday, The New York Times set out what the government’s options might be. One potential route could be to designate stablecoins as systematically risky, meaning they would be subject to far stricter oversight than at present.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could also label some stablecoins as securities, meaning these assets would officially be the agency’s responsibility. The commission’s crypto-aware chairman, Gary Gensler, has previously said that he believes some stablecoins should be characterized this way.
Stablecoins could also be treated as if they were bank deposits, a move that could open the door to insurance that “would protect individuals if the company backing the stablecoin went belly up,” the newspaper noted.
International cooperation has also been cited as an option, and it’s fair to say that there has been a lack of a united front when it comes to regulating digital assets.
Others argue that the best way of countering the risk of stablecoins is for the U.S. to launch its own central bank digital currency. However, the Federal Reserve is yet to properly commit to a test project, meaning that it risks falling behind other major economies.
