Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. NORMAN. Mr. Chair, my amendment is pretty simple. It requires the Treasury Secretary in consultation with the CFTC and the SEC to complete a study and submit a report to Congress that identifies any digital asset registrants that are owned by governments of foreign adversaries.

The report will determine whether foreign adversary governments are collecting or trading personal data about American citizens in the digital asset markets and evaluate whether foreign adversary governments are misusing or stealing any proprietary intellectual property of digital asset registrants.

The GAO is required to complete a study and submit a report to Congress on the very same issues.

This amendment would promote transparency regarding how our Nation's strategic enemies may be exploiting the digital asset marketplace to invade the privacy of Americans and steal valuable intellectual property.

In June 2023, the Financial Services hearings that focused on the very bill that we are considering today, Aaron Kaplan, the CEO of, Prometheum, the first and only SEC/FINRA approved Special Purpose Broker-Dealer for digital assets, stated that Prometheum and its CCP partners entered into a joint agreement in December 2018 to develop a blockchain trading system where the Chinese partner took a 20 percent stake in Prometheum.

In case anyone has any doubts about the CCP ties, Prometheum's Chinese partner company was founded in 1969 by a former senior CCP official. In 2021, the party's central committee posthumously named him a ``National Excellent Communist Party member.''

In July 2023, several of my colleagues and I sent a letter to the SEC and the DOJ expressing our concerns with inconsistencies in Prometheum's public filings and the CCP's ownership of an entity that had the blessing of the SEC and FINRA to operate in the United States.

I followed up on this letter in a September 2023 hearing with the SEC Chair Gary Gensler, where he dodged my question and did not take my concerns of the 20 percent CCP ownership of Prometheum seriously.

The fact of the matter is that because Chinese companies are generally required by Chinese law to share data with the Chinese Government, these companies present substantial risks to United States individual privacy and our national security. Chinese-owned broker- dealers like Prometheum, Webull, and MooMoo operate as registered entities here in the United States, and the Biden administration and Chair Gensler do not seem to care, yet they attack American businesses operating in good faith with no regulatory clarity.

This is simply how the CCP and other foreign adversaries operate. They infiltrate our markets while the Biden administration looks the other way and punishes American companies who are only trying to operate in the United States but face endless regulation by enforcement of the Biden administration.

We need to pass FIT21 into law because the SEC's current regulation by enforcement is putting the United States at a disadvantage and allowing foreign adversaries to gain an advantage in our U.S. crypto markets, all while Gary Gensler attacks American public companies who have tried to work with the SEC and come in and register.

I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of this amendment to protect Americans from having their personal data shared with the CCP and other foreign adversaries.

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Mr. NORMAN. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

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Mr. NORMAN. Mr. Chair, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Hill).

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