This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 27th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Federal regulators have been sending mixed messages about how they think about

cryptocurencies. Are they commodities? Are they securities? Are they something

entirely new? Diego Zulawaga is author of a new Cato paper should

crypto currencies be regulated like securities.

We spoke Monday.

Since the last time we talked about whether or not

cryptocuracies ought to be regulated as commodities or whether or not cryptocurrencies ought to be regulated as commodities

or whether they ought to be regulated as securities

or whether they should not be regulated at all.

Or if there's some new category of some sort of a hunk of value and how you regulate how those

get transferred and dealt with, what has changed since that last conversation?

Well, regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission

and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which are the two main regulatory bodies that have involved themselves with

cryptocurrencies, have been making different statements as to whether they are commodities

or securities, but the most significant development, which happened a couple of weeks ago was a speech by

William Hynman who works at the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that

Ethereum which is the second most popular cryptocurrency by market size did not qualify as a security. Now coming from the body

that regulates securities markets this is a big statement because it means

that a major platform on which a lot of other

cryptocurrencies run will not be subject to the registration and

...