Ex-CFTC Chair Dithers on Whether Ether Is Security or Commodity

The question continues to go unanswered.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s chairman Gary Gensler made headlines last week for his inability to straightforwardly answer if Ether was a security or commodity. Late last week, Timothy Massad, the former chair of the CFTC (the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) walked into the same line of questioning only to dither in his response.

Sign up for the premium Crypto Investor newsletter today to get exclusive stories.

It was a question that Iowa Republican representative Zach Nunn took up and asked Massad, before the official curtly dismissed it: “I don’t have enough information,” Massad said.

“The concern about Ether… was in the Merge, where they changed the system of validating transactions, there seemed to be a foundation, a group of people involved in that… Is that, under the Howey test, a common enterprise?” Massad asked.

Next month a joint hearing on crypto is scheduled by the House Agriculture Committee and the House Financial Services Committee. It is unclear if the question will find an answer by then.