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Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini are urging U.S. senators to strike a clause from the Digital Asset Market Structure Bill that would bar exchanges from listing tokens deemed \u201creadily susceptible to manipulation,\u201d warning it would effectively kill compliant listings for small-cap coins.<\/p>\n
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According to\u00a0Politico<\/a>\u00a0and subsequent reporting summarized by\u00a0CrowdfundInsider<\/a>, the three U.S. centralized exchanges submitted redlined edits to Senate Agriculture Committee staff asking them to delete language that would allow only digital commodities \u201cnot readily susceptible to manipulation\u201d to be listed on registered \u201cdigital commodity exchanges.\u201d That standard mirrors a long-standing Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) test for futures markets, where contracts can be denied or delisted if the underlying is too easy to manipulate. But in the spot-token context, Coinbase Federal Policy Director Robin Cook called it a \u201cchicken-and-egg problem\u201d: how can a token become liquid and less vulnerable to manipulation without first being listed on a major venue.<\/p>\n In their edits, the exchanges warned that grafting a futures-style manipulation test into the spot-token regime would \u201ceffectively shut small, low-liquidity tokens out of regulated venues and hand future CFTC chairs a blunt tool to choke innovation.\u201d They argue that while the goal of preventing manipulation is shared, applying a binary \u201cnot readily susceptible\u201d bar at the listing stage ignores how liquidity and surveillance actually work in crypto spot markets, where even large-cap assets can be volatile and thin during stress. Instead, the firms are pushing for a \u201ctailored framework\u201d based on robust market-surveillance obligations, disclosure, and ongoing risk monitoring, rather than an ex ante veto focused on theoretical manipulability.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As\u00a0crypto.news\u00a0has reported, Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini have told lawmakers that the clause could create a de facto whitelist regime where only a handful of large tokens like\u00a0Bitcoin\u00a0and\u00a0Ethereum\u00a0pass muster, while thousands of smaller projects are forced onto unregulated offshore platforms. \u201cMillions of Americans are participating in digital asset markets without the federal regulatory protections they deserve,\u201d the companies said in one joint message, insisting that their goal is \u201cexpanding oversight, not limiting it\u201d \u2014 but in a way that \u201cdoes not come at the cost of market access.\u201d That argument fits into a broader industry push for comprehensive U.S. market-structure rules, with more than 120 firms signing a recent letter urging the Senate Banking Committee to move forward on the CLARITY Act, as covered in another crypto.news\u00a0story.<\/p>\n The contested language sits inside a sweeping digital asset market-structure package that would, for the first time, bring spot \u201cdigital commodities\u201d \u2014 essentially non-security tokens akin to Bitcoin and Ether \u2014 under direct CFTC supervision via a new class of registered digital commodity exchanges. Under a section-by-section draft released by House and Senate negotiators, those exchanges would be \u201callowed to list only those digital commodities that are not susceptible to manipulation\u201d and for which they have performed diligence on market structure and underlying networks. The Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC, controls half of the bill, while the Senate Banking Committee handles provisions that set security-token and stablecoin rules, leaving the listing standard a key battleground in inter-committee talks.<\/p>\n Industry advocates say that if the \u201cnot readily susceptible to manipulation\u201d language survives, it could incentivize developers to launch tokens abroad or rely on decentralized exchanges that fall outside the bill\u2019s registration perimeter, undermining the goal of bringing activity onshore. On the other hand, some market-abuse experts and consumer groups have praised the clause as one of the few hard brakes on listing risky, thinly traded assets that have been frequent targets of wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes, concerns crypto.news has explored in prior enforcement-focused\u00a0stories. With time running out in the current Congress, the exchanges\u2019 lobbying blitz underscores how much of the future small-cap token market could hinge on a few lines of statutory language \u2014 and how fiercely both sides are prepared to fight over what \u201cmanipulation\u201d should mean in U.S. crypto law.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini are urging U.S. senators to strike a clause from the Digital Asset Market Structure Bill that would bar exchanges from listing tokens deemed \u201creadily susceptible to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptocurrency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29102,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101\/revisions\/29102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitunikey.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini are fighting the clause<\/h2>\n
Inside the Digital Asset Market Structure Bill fight<\/h2>\n