My latest article, co-authored with my friend Thomas Vartanian, argues that the SEC learn from history and regulate the crypto industry in order to protect the public interest.
From the article:
We are all for giving investors the opportunity to lose money on speculative fliers. But we get concerned when investment products that double as digital currencies can be invented, moderated, sold, and exchanged by who-knows-who and permitted to become so large that they impact traditional financial systems.
As Commissioner Crenshaw suggested, the Spot Bitcoin ETF applications provided the SEC with a gold-plated opportunity to expose the underlying flaws in the crypto business and the systemic issues that are being created. The SEC could have deferred its decision until Congress acted. At the other end of the spectrum, it could have begun to regulate the quality of the underlying crypto business despite the legal challenges to its authority that invariably would have followed. It did neither, deciding instead merely to allow the market to decide and see where the chips may fall.
Read the full article here.