A Regulatory Reckoning for the Crypto Industry?

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this week’s Breakdown weekly recap, NLW looks at a cross-section of regulatory news, including: CFTC and DOJ action against BitMEX and its leadership The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority’s ban of crypto derivative products for retail investors The DOJ’s new cryptocurrency enforcement framework NLW discusses why these might reflect a new moment in crypto history, what it means for current builders in bitcoin and DeFi, and why recruiting corporate allies like Square will become more important than ever.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.
0:09.2	It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.
0:15.2	The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, nexo.io, and elliptic, and produced and distributed by CoinDes.
0:23.0	What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, October 10th, which means it's time for the weekly recap.
0:30.1	And when I look back over the last week, really the last couple weeks, it's very clear to me that there is one major theme, and that is the
0:40.8	rise of the regulatory dogs of war. Are we facing a regulatory reckoning coming for the
0:48.6	crypto industry? So what do I mean? For the past year or so, most of the regulatory action has felt like
0:55.8	simply catching up with ICO-era-Crypto. Since many in the space feel they've moved on from that,
1:02.6	no one has been all that concerned when X or Y ICO is forced to settle and pay back its
1:08.6	earnings because whatever, that was from 2017, that's a million
1:12.4	years ago. The last 10 days or so, however, have felt markedly different, so let's walk through
1:18.2	them. First was the action against Bitmex. On the one hand, this wasn't a complete shocker. We've known
1:24.9	since early summer 2019 that the CFTC was looking into Bitmex and weren't
1:30.1	particularly pleased with them. They had also announced this as Bitmex had announced that
1:34.5	after a six-month grace period everyone was going to need to be KYC'd. Well, whatever was going on
1:40.9	behind the scenes with Bitmex trying to make nice, it didn't seem to work.
1:46.0	Last Thursday, the CFTC announced just an absolute slew of accusations against the company,
1:52.0	but that wasn't all.
1:54.0	The Department of Justice actually filed criminal complaints as well around violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. The CTO of Bitmex was even arrested.
2:04.7	I had Stephen Paley and Preston Byrne both lawyers on my show last week, and they both thought that
2:11.4	this marked a pretty significant escalation. Fines and fees are one thing, but jail time is absolutely another. Subsequently,
2:21.3	we just got news in the end of this week that Arthur Hayes and the other leadership had stepped
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Blockworks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Blockworks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.