What happened at FTX? Senate Agriculture Committee wants to find out

WASHINGTON — Sens.  Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and John Boozman, R-Ark., the panel’s ranking member, have scheduled a hearing on the collapse of FTX. 

The hearing, set for Dec. 1, is the third announced by Congress following the unwinding of the crypto exchange. The Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee have both said they will host hearings on the issue, scheduled for an undetermined date in December. 

The Senate Agriculture Committee will host Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Rostin Behnam. 

The hearings come after the collapse of trading platform FTX and the dramatic downfall of its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, a major player in Washington D.C. conversations about crypto given his large donation portfolio, especially among Democrats. 

Stabenow and Boozman are also trying to salvage their bill to regulate crypto, which was backed by Bankman-Fried. It would have given the CFTC more responsibility for policing the two largest cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and ethereum. 

The legislation has not been withdrawn, but the senators are looking to revisit it because of the FTX collapse. 

“In light of these developments, we are taking a top-down look to ensure it establishes the necessary safeguards the digital commodities market desperately needs,” Boozman previously said in a written statement.

The Stabenow-Boozman bill represents one of several factions when it comes to regulating cryptocurrency. After the downfall of FTX, these competing groups have doubled down on their visions of what oversight into digital assets should look like. 

Reps. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., are working on a bill that would regulate stablecoin issuers, while  Sens. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would make it easier for certain digital asset banks to get access to Federal Reserve accounts.

Bankman-Fried made two appearances before the Senate Agriculture Committee earlier this year. The Agriculture Committee oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which monitors crypto exchanges. FTX is registered and licensed with the CFTC and, until last Friday, it was seeking to register its subsidiary, LedgerX, as a derivatives clearing organization.