In the Chamber of Senators of the Argentine Republic, discussion is taking place on a bill that deals with the regulation of advertising on cryptocurrencies, pursuing the protection of investors and consumers according to the explanatory statement of the National Securities Commission, through Sebastián Negri who serves as its current president.
On December 14, the permanent commission of the National Economy and Investment of the Argentine Senate held a meeting with the president of the National Securities Commission, Sebastián Negri, the director of the Securities Commission, Martín Breinlinger, and the deputy manager of Protection of Investor as guests to discuss the bill on misleading advertising.
In the debated ideas that occurred in the middle of the commission, Negri exposed the need to form and pass a law aimed at misleading advertising about investing in the crypto ecosystemin which it is intended to protect the citizen when investing.
Senator Guillermo Eduardo Andrada, from the province of Catamarca, promotes this project, making clear a transversal aspect in the discussion, what this bill seeks is not to regulate the cryptographic markets, much less these financial products, but solely and exclusively to give the National Securities Commission (CNV) the power to supervise the advertising of unregulated assets, such as crypto assets.
In the development of the idea by Senator Andrada and the president of the CNV, there was widespread talk about the ponzi schemes that have occurred in Argentine territoryand in their explanation they consider that misleading advertising is a fundamental part of carrying out these frauds.
In principle, an advertisement that promises future returns on an investment in a market such as cryptographic consider it a type of fraud. Negri specified that: “Beyond the fact that the possibility of advertising is in the streets, on posters in the streets, one of the things that is expected, because it happened in various parts of the world, is that, with the rise of Bitcoin from 10,000 to 69,000 dollars, what they did was promise people that the profitability that occurred the previous year was going to be repeated for those who entered now. That is false advertising. One cannot promise guaranteed profits. That’s a basic rule, but it was happening. Banks can’t do that kind of thing, but here we have an ecosystem with low regulation“.
So, the purpose of this regulation is precisely to try to avoid this, that investors and users are financially educated before making a decisionthat is why the intervention of the National Securities Commission in principle is to establish a “disclaimer“, a kind of banner under all crypto advertising, saying: “It is a risky investment and you have the possibility of losing all your investment“. And a section so that there is more information and that the person can learn about what type of investment they are making, in the case of opting for any of these assets.
This proposal already had its first adverse positionSenator Álvarez Rivero openly expressed her disagreement with the project, indicating that “I don’t like this project. I don’t like regulations and I don’t really understand how to regulate something that isn’t regulated. It sounds to me that it is a first step towards a regulation. But, to get a little into this whole world of Bitcoins, the first thing I would tell you is that no one in the world of these innovative crypto assets asks us for this; Unlike”.
He argued in his speech that People go to this type of investment because the “Inflation eats us up: it eats up our salaries, it eats up our assets, it even eats up the states”. So the senator considers two things to rescue, the first of which is that she considers that Cryptoactives as a refuge of value in the face of an economy as volatile as that of the South American country.
The second thing that emerges from these statements is the clear opposition to regulating the Crypto-assets market, because in his way of seeing things, discourages users who precisely choose to trust a decentralized ecosystem.
The ideas continued to emerge throughout this first debate, in which the president of the National Securities Commission was even questioned about the power to supervise these advertisements and, instead, pointed out other financial problems that the Argentine nation has and in which the CNV does not act in this regard.
In defense of the bill on deceptive advertising on cryptocurrencies, the president of the CNV and Senator Andrada made particular emphasis on the use of personalities from art, entertainment, athletes and influencers for the promotion of this type of investment without having a risk warning of loss of the invested resources.
In addition, the need to grant this supervisory quality to the National Securities Commission was defended to protect investors and avoid from all possible angles, the ponzi schemes. And in order to defend this point, Negri in his intervention remarked that: “In a case that I cannot name because it is the subject of a judicial investigation, but in a very, very well-known specific case, which came out in all the media, influencers of all kinds were paid. The criminal complaint was not made by a public body, but by the NGO Bitcoin Argentina. Why? Because the private sector of this industry, of this ecosystem, promotes trust, and they themselves are the ones who try to separate the wheat from the chaff. So, it also helps them not only that the State has a look at those who operate by pushing people to invest in things they don’t know about”.
The meeting with the commission agreed to continue listening to all the opinions of the experts to reach a determination on this bill, but that will already be for the next legislative period, they indicated at the end.
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