On January 23, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published Safe Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 122, which rescinded SAB 121.
SAB 121 was established in 2022 by the Biden administration in light of banks and other entities holding an increasing amount of crypto assets. SAB 121 required financial entities to record crypto assets as liabilities, “with a corresponding asset, when an entity does not control the crypto assets.” That is, banks needed to back up the risk of the cryptocurrency they held with an appropriate level of capital. The “nature and amount” of crypto assets also had to be disclosed.
Such disclosures included information about who holds the cryptographic keys, who maintains internal recordkeeping, and who is obligated to secure the assets and protect them from loss or theft.
Deloitte
SEC Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda launched a task force to establish a regulatory framework for crypto assets after having just removed such a regulatory framework.
This marks yet another attempt to deregulate cryptocurrency; in this case, bad actors can exploit the transitional chaos caused by the rescission, and the fact that banks are less accountable for the crypto assets that they hold. This does not matter to Trump, who, as Trumpfile readers are aware of, has profited off of cryptocurrency over the course of his Presidency.
