There are still industry executives that remain hopeful the United States will develop laws to treat crypto fairly, however, an advisory to the Crypto Council for Innovation warns it will take “a lot of work.”
Speaking to Cointelegraph on March 29 at the World of Web3 (WOW) Summit in Hong Kong, Crypto Council for Innovation advisor and co-founder of Odsy Network, Sean Lee, said that fair treatment of the crypto industry is possible in the United States.
He commented that financial reform was addressed following the 2008 financial crisis so there is no reason the same cannot be applied to crypto.
“It is possible, it will take a lot of work […] and usually implementation comes after a massive crisis, which we have right now.”
The comments come in the wake of a massive crypto crackdown by U.S. financial regulators in what some industry commentators have labeled a “war on crypto.”
The FTX meltdown in November appears to have given regulators and anti-crypto lawmakers plenty of ammunition to bring the hammer down on the fledgling crypto industry. However, Lee pointed out that FTX is not crypto, it is just a centralized trading venue, adding:
“If you don’t properly regulate centralized entities, well, we’ve seen back in history many times about what can go wrong.”
He said that there was a lot of education that needed to be done and this is what organizations such as the Crypto Council for Innovation are trying to achieve.
The Council is striving for dialogue with politicians to help them understand where things are and “help them also understand what other jurisdictions are thinking about,” he added.
The assistance can be provided to “help craft more progressive policies” that allow for both the communities and companies to understand the landscape much better.
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Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, made similar arguments in a statement on the recent CFTC Binance lawsuit, stating that it “will hopefully mean the end of people coming into the crypto space trying to take advantage of the lack of regulatory clarity in the United States.”
She also said that the CFTC’s classification of certain cryptos as commodities was “a powerful shot across the bow of the SEC.”
In a related development, SEC chair Gary Gensler has requested a larger budget to tackle what he termed the “Wild West” of crypto markets this week. Therefore, it remains unlikely that Uncle Sam’s war on crypto will be over any time soon.