On October 6, the office of Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine, returned to Parliament a bill that would establish a comprehensive regulatory regime for digital assets.
The primary issue that the president’s office had was the establishment of a new regulatory body for crypto, which would be expensive:
“The creation of a new body, as provided by this law, will require significant expenditures from the state budget. Therefore, Volodymyr Zelensky proposes to include the regulation of the circulation of virtual assets in the competence of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission.”
The National Securities and Stock Market Commission is Ukraine’s equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission but is itself fairly underfunded. As of 2019, the most recent year of published data, the commission’s budget was just over 135 million hryvnya — at current exchange rates, roughly $5 million USD.
