Texas enforcers want Sam Bankman-Fried to attend the hearing in February: Law Decoded

Welcome to Law Decoded, your weekly digest of all the major developments in the field of regulation.

There was some substantial good news for crypto last week, but the prevailing storyline is still the unfolding of FTX. While the extradition of the failed exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried seemed pretty logical from the beginning of the saga, last week, the 30-year-old got the first official call: The Texas State Securities Board (SSB) invited the former CEO to attend the hearing on the alleged sale of unregistered securities on Feb. 2. SSB’s director of enforcement Joe Rotunda hopes to get a Cease and Desist order from the judge during the hearing.

However, the man himself doesn’t rush to get back to America, even for the Congress invitation. Bankman-Fried has signaled he’s unwilling to testify before the United States Congress until he’s “finished learning and reviewing what happened.”

Meanwhile, the FTX crush continues to cause a ripple effect all over the world. In Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong are set to face grilling questions for their failure to protect retail investors. As Singaporean state-backed investor Temasek was one of 69 investors to invest in the FTX crypto exchange’s $420 million funding round in October 2021, opposition MPs have recommended a bipartisan committee to question Temasek on its investment strategies.

In Europe, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, highlighted the FTX failure stating the necessity of the second package of crypto regulations after the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCa) would come into law. Her United States House Financial Services Committee colleagues will also pay closer attention to the FTX case during the special hearing scheduled for Dec. 13. And the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) already held one — answering the “How did it happen?” questions its Chairman Rostin Behnam predictably asked for more power to the Commission.

Brazil passes law to legalize crypto as a payment method

And now for the good news! The Chamber of Deputies of Brazil, a federal legislative body, has passed a regulatory framework that legalizes the use of cryptocurrencies as a payment method within the country. While the document won’t make Bitcoin (BTC) a legal tender as in El Salvador, it still will include digital currencies and air mileage programs in the definition of payment methods that are under the supervision of…