U.S. Senate Banking Committee Schedules ‘Crypto Crash’ Hearing for February 14th

The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is primed to probe last year’s crypto crash on Valentine’s Day.

The committee scheduled a hearing for February 14th at 10 a.m. titled “Crypto Crash: Why Financial System Safeguards are Needed for Digital Assets,” according to an announcement released by committee chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) on Friday.

Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the banking committee’s ranking Republican member, released a statement this week outlining the committee’s priorities for the current congressional legislative session. Scott says one of his top priorities is developing a framework for digital assets.

“Recent years have seen expansive growth in the digital assets industry, including an increasing number of consumers interacting with cryptocurrencies. Several high-profile failures resulted in lost consumer assets, exposed regulatory gaps, and highlighted concerns with illicit finance. Moving forward, the Committee should work to facilitate a bipartisan regulatory framework.”

The Senate banking committee previously held a hearing on December 14th to discuss the collapse of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

Brown has previously called the cryptocurrency market a “complicated, unregulated pot of money” and argued that its issues were larger than FTX itself.

“I’ve spent much of the last eight years and a half in this job as chair of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, educating my colleagues and trying to educate the public about crypto and the dangers that it presents to our security as a nation and the consumers that get hoodwinked by them.”

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