House of Representatives

Mike Flood, a second-term lawmaker from Nebraska, has played central casting in the effort to make Congress move on crypto policy.

Republican Rep. Mike Flood, a soft-spoken second-term lawmaker from Nebraska, might seem like an unlikely candidate to pull the strings when it comes to cryptocurrency policy in Congress. Nonetheless, he played central casting in May when his colleagues took historic action by voting for the first to pass two measures that would lay out rules for the industry.

It was the culmination of effort by Flood, who cosponsored both pieces of legislation, along with a small group of his colleagues, who won support a surprising amount of bipartisan support for both the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) and another proposal that would repeal a Securities and Exchange Commission rule known as SAB-121.

“If you would have told me we would have received 71 votes from House Democrats, I would never have believed it,” Flood said in an interview with Cointelegraph, referring to the vote for FIT21. The measure would allow cryptocurrency projects to “certify” that their tokens are commodities — moving them out of the SEC’s regulatory purview and over to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Read more