WTH Happened with FTX? with Tonya Evans

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year's Super Bowl featured a who's who of celebrities hawking cryptocurrency and crypto platforms like FTX. In retrospect that looks like the boom before the bust. This year, crypto prices have tumbled and one of the most valued exchanges, FTX, collapsed in a cloud of alleged fraud and federal indictments. So is it all a scam? A pyramid scheme? Will crypto endure? Our guest this week thinks it will, but says accused fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has shown the world just how risky the market can be for new users. It remains unclear if FTX customers will ever get their money back or if crypto can ever be seen more broadly as a trustworthy store of value. Tonya Evans is a tenured full professor at Penn State Dickinson Law School whose work focuses on the legal, regulatory, policy and economic justice implications of new technologies and innovation. She also hosts a weekly podcast called “Tech Intersect,” all about the intersection of law, business and tech. Evans joins WITHpod to discuss why, in her view, the collapse of FTX isn’t a crypto problem, rather a fraud problem, what the future of regulation in the space could look like and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We have a huge problem from a UI UX point of view in the crypto ecosystem.
0:05.8	That means that it's very clunky.
0:08.1	It's setting up a wallet.
0:09.5	You're trying to figure out what the wallet is.
0:11.0	Do you have the right wallet for the right type of crypto or token?
0:14.5	Most people tap out,
0:15.9	unless they're highly motivated or highly geeky or highly both, which is me.
0:20.4	So the idea of making the user experience a lot
0:24.1	friendlier to onboard people into this asset class is a lot of a one and a necessary one
0:30.2	for broader adoption of crypto.
0:32.0	The problem is when you have fraudsters in the mix as well.
0:34.9	And so that becomes obviously the problem here with FTX.
0:42.0	Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:51.4	It is super bowl time this time of year.
0:53.6	And of course, super bowl time it means a suitable ads.
0:56.9	And maybe you recall if you were a super bowl watcher,
0:59.4	which I think is a majority of households in the United States,
1:01.9	last year, super bowl was one of the main things that left out about last year,
1:06.9	super bowl in the ads was the insane,
1:10.8	almost overwhelming presence of ads for crypto.
1:14.3	You know, crypto currencies, individual cryptocurrencies, crypto exchanges,
1:18.5	all sorts of crypto spin off businesses.
	...

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