U.S. banking agencies set plan for tackling crypto oversight

U.S. banking agencies are moving closer to regulating cryptocurrencies. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre details the latest.

Video transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: We continue to watch the Dow flip between green and red. The NASDAQ remains the biggest loser on the day, as investors digest President Biden's new Fed nominees. You can see there the NASDAQ still off about 1%.

Also want to check in on the crypto markets here as we are getting a joint statement from the Fed, alongside some of the other regulatory agencies here looking at crypto, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, focusing in on the agenda ahead to set the guidelines for what it might look like in terms of saying what is and is not kosher when it comes to the quickly growing crypto sector, including the possibility of setting capital standards for companies interacting in that market.

And for more on that, I want to bring on Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre, who's taking a closer look. And Jared, right now, ETH up about 3%. Doesn't seem like too many people are worried about this.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. And over the last 24 hours, Bitcoin up four basis points. So I just want to kind of break this down. This is really interesting. We know that a lot of the regulatory agencies and groups have been putting their heads together to tackle various crypto issues. And so this is on the banking side. I'll just pull up a chart of Bitcoin here over the last 24 hours. No commentary on the price action, except to say we are still in the bottom end of this range. My tap-out point for Bitcoin is 54,000. So, going to be watching that very closely.

Back to the matter at hand, this paper, which is described as a joint statement on crypto asset policy sprint initiative and next steps, they're calling this a policy sprint. And if you're in the tech world, you know there is something called a tech sprint. And so they're saying similar to a tech sprint model, agency staff with various backgrounds and relevance subject matter expertise conducted preliminary analysis on various issues regarding crypto assets.

So let me get to some of the highlights from this report, which I have here on the YFi Interactive. Just give me one second. There we go. So the main focal points are crypto asset custody. And this has to do with banks taking custody of crypto assets. And this was a point of contention years ago. It kind of got solved. The New York State BitLicense was a big part of that. Also looking at how banks helped broker customer crypto trades, that's big, both purchases and sales, crypto collateral collateralized loans. And so that has to do with making money off of your crypto. And it kind of gets into the DeFi space.

And then payments and stablecoins. We all know there's a lot of hype around that. So we'll have to see what comes to this. They're going to be doing this well into 2022. It's going to be doing various question and answer segments with customers and industry participants. Guys.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and as people who are maybe proponents of the crypto sector, not something that they have feared when it comes to regulation. We've heard from a few people in the space, including Mike Novogratz at Galaxy Digital talking about why this would be an eventual good thing to prevent some of the problems in crypto, specifically when it comes to lending. A lot of people may be concerned. We could see some similar mistakes that we saw in the banking crisis back in '08. And Jared Blikre, appreciate that.