Leaders of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs published an initial discussion draft of digital asset market structure legislation within the committee’s jurisdiction and issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking feedback from stakeholders. The draft is positioned as building on the House-passed CLARITY Act. The discussion draft would define an “ancillary asset” to clarify which digital assets are not securities and create tailored disclosure requirements for offers, sales, or distributions of ancillary assets. It would also require the Securities and Exchange Commission to develop new rules, including a proposed “Regulation DA” to exempt certain ancillary-asset offers or sales from SEC registration, including where offers or sales do not exceed USD 75 million in gross proceeds per year over four years, and to more clearly define what constitutes an investment contract. Additional elements include directing the SEC to tailor existing requirements to digital asset activity, establishing examination standards for digital assets and encouraging private sector coordination with federal law enforcement to counter illicit finance, and confirming that financial holding companies may use digital asset or distributed ledger systems to deliver activities that banks are otherwise authorized by law to provide. The RFI asks for input on the draft and related questions across regulatory clarity and tailoring, investor protection, trading venues and market infrastructure, custody, illicit finance, banking, innovation, and preemption.

Original source View in tracker