Senate banking chairman says ‘maybe’ to cryptocurrency ban

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) on Sunday said federal agencies need to address the cryptocurrency market and “maybe” ban it after the high-profile collapse of cryptocurrency market FTX last month. Brown, the chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd that the Treasury Department and “all the different agencies” need to get together and assess any possible action related to the cryptocurrency market. “Maybe banning it, although banning it is very difficult because it will go offshore and who knows how that will work,” Brown said. The U.S. is seeking the extradition of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried after the collapse of his cryptocurrency market in November. Federal authorities charged Bankman-Fried with taking customer funds and using it to fund a lavish lifestyle and investments in his trading firm Alameda Research. The collapse of FTX alarmed regulatory agencies and spooked investors, raising renewed fears about the future of the digital currency market. Last week, the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee held a hearing on the collapse of FTX along with a separate hearing by the House Financial Services Committee. Brown on Sunday said the cryptocurrency market is a “complicated, unregulated pot of money” and the issue was much larger than FTX. “So we’ve got to do this right,” the senator said, adding that he has talked to the Treasury Department to do a related assessment across regulatory agencies. “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,” Brown added “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.”