The U.S. Treasury secretary emphasized the department’s crypto observation efforts at a House money Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.
United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the House financial Services Committee on Wednesday that her department isn't seeing vital use of cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions placed on Russian oligarchs and government agencies. Yellen was asked repeatedly concerning digital asset security at the committee’s annual hearing on the state of the international financial system.
“We are aware of the chance, clearly, that crypto may be used as a tool to evade sanctions and that we are carefully monitoring to form certain that doesn’t occur,” Yellen said. “But, i would say that we've got an honest deal of authority during this space and are using it and will use it.”
It is hard to use crypto to evade sanctions, Yellen assured the committee, as blockchains are being “regularly examined,” and large transactions would be created note of. “[Crypto] exchanges are subject to AML/CFT [Anti-Money Laundering/Combatting the finance of Terrorism] laws, in order that they are a part of the economic system,” she said. “We haven’t seen vital evasion through crypto to date.”
The Treasury’s office of Foreign Assets control announced Tuesday that it'll impose sanctions on Moscow-based digital currency exchange Garantex for regardless AML/CFT laws, and on the Russian-language darknet marketplace Hydra for accommodating ransomware attacks. The Treasury was one among many U.S. agencies that worked to sanction those organizations.
Sanctions weren't the only crypto-related problems on committee members’ minds. Representative Bill Foster asked concerning digital identification. Yellen same her department has “very wide-ranging equities within the digital identity house, partly as a result of we have a tendency to administer public edges [and] tax refunds,” and guaranteed the legislator that “we are fleshing out actions that we can take to advance this agenda.”
Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio expressed his concern concerning conserving self-hosted digital wallets, that he characterized as “self-custody of personal property while not an intercessor.”
Yellen can talk about U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order on digital assets and the Treasury’s approach to that at American University in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
( Derek Andersen, Cointelegraph, 2022 )