Plus500 to Acquire Cunningham Commodities financemagnates.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from financemagnates.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Monday, December 21, 2020
Executive Summary
As one of the regulators engaged in the cryptocurrency space, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been bringing enforcement actions against virtual currency market participants, including traders, issuers, exchanges, and service providers. From January 1, 2015, to June 30, 2020, the CFTC brought 19 such actions.
Of the 19 actions between 2015 and Q2 2020, 14 were litigated in U.S. district courts. The other five were resolved within the CFTC as orders and simultaneous settlements.
The majority of actions involved an allegedly fraudulent scheme, with 14 out of the 19 involving allegedly misleading investors in the trading of commodities.
Eight of the 19 actions involved alleged failure to register with the CFTC, while four of the actions involved allegedly illegal off-exchange commodity transactions.
Monday, December 21, 2020
Virtual Currencies as Commodities
In recent years, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or the Commission) has taken a role as one of the regulators of cryptocurrency in the United States. In this article, we review the CFTC’s regulatory and enforcement approach in this space.
In December 2014, the CFTC stated that virtual currencies are encompassed under the definition of a “commodity” in the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), and thus subject to its jurisdiction.
[1] Nine months later, in September 2015, the CFTC brought its first enforcement action against an unregistered Bitcoin option trading platform.
[2] With its first action, the CFTC declared that “Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are encompassed in the definition and properly defined as commodities.”