SEC Chair on crypto: 'It’s a bit of the Wild West'

In an interview with Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung, SEC Chair Gensler discusses the unregulated state of the cryptocurrency industry. He also weighs in on the SEC's role in regulating DeFi and stablecoins.

Video transcript

- And you draw the comparison to banking. Does that mean that-- because it's not just the SEC that's in that space, right. The Federal Reserve, the OCC, the FDIC. So have you had discussions with them also about the proper way to approach these types of new offerings?

GARY GENSLER: Well, under Secretary Yellen's leadership at the Treasury Department, the President's working group, a group of financial regulators, we're working together around stablecoins. And again, the stablecoins of today-- this $130 billion or so which has been rapidly growing-- could lead to payment tokens and general purpose payment tokens in the future.

But even the current system, the current remit, we're working most closely with, again, our sibling market regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but also along with the bank regulators, and lastly, the Consumer Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has a lot of authorities around payment systems as well. So we're all working together trying to bring the protections that we've had and our traditional securities markets, derivatives markets, and the like.