As Unregulated Cryptocurrency Market Grows, Bill Seeks to Provide Clarity

With the value of digital cryptocurrency rising at never-before-seen rates over the last decade and a half, calls are increasingly coming for the government to regulate a monetary market that experts say could upend the U.S. financial system without proper oversight.

When Bitcoin, the first form of cryptocurrency, first emerged in 2009, it was valued at less than a cent per coin. But since then, its value has skyrocketed at a rate never before seen in modern financial history. By October 2025, it peaked at over $126,000 per coin, and has since settled in price at around $75,000, amounting to an incomprehensible 160 million percent increase since its inception.

So what exactly is cryptocurrency? During Tuesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Richard Stern, who serves as vice president of the Plymouth Institute for Free Enterprise at Advancing American Freedom, described it as “a digital placeholder for ownership over something else. Now, sometimes the thing you’re owning is just the digital marker, like Bitcoin. It’s just a code packet with millions of calculations in it. But sometimes it’s a token that represents real gold or a barrel of oil somewhere. So in some ways, it’s kind of like a digitized version of an old stock certificate.”