Recent Regulatory News: US Regulations Worsen, Financial Stability Has Priority Over Individual Investors in Germany
Shapeshift appears to be the most vocal critics of the new and the current direction in which US cryptocurrency regulations are heading, after the passing of the Bill 5031 in Washington and New York. The bill demands that cryptocurrency exchanges provide regulators with customer information and trading data.
Jon, the co-founder, and COO of Shapeshift said in a recent interview that: “I would say in the US it’s actually gotten worse […] especially in the last 6 months. I think the explosion of value in 2017 brought a lot of these regulators into space and made them more concerned. Most of them don’t understand what the heck it (cryptocurrency) is, but they want to control it.” Jon also accused regulators of failing to “give clarity,” stating “all these companies and lawyers and lobbyists are left to read the regulatory tea-leaves […] Nobody knows what the rules are and everyone’s just left to figure it out, that’s a dangerous place to be.”
According to him, decentralized exchanges comprise a form of resistance to the current regulatory climate on the part of the cryptocurrency community. The COO of shapeshifts sai concerning decentralized exchanges: “I think it’s a lesson to the smart regulators in the space that if they don’t work with companies, they’ll push things that way, and it’ll become harder and harder for them to have an impact in the space. The more regulators push hard, the more things become unregulatable.”
In an effort to conclude, Jon advocated that a collective approach among companies in the cryptocurrency sector should be taken so as to push for a more amenable regulatory frame. He said he hopes “more and more of the crypto companies do band together to help educate the regulators in the space and try to work together to do something productive.”
In Germany, the president of Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory (BaFin) has given a speech in which he addressed cryptocurrencies, emphasizing on the regulator’s primary intention as being preserving financial stability rather than issues affecting individual investors.
As roughly translated, Mr. Hutfield said: “We will not be able to protect every single investor from his fate, and that can not be the task of state supervision. Once again, the maxim is that we must act on a prudent or regulatory basis if financial stability as a whole is threatened.”
He went ahead to speak favorably of cryptocurrency; he also distributed ledger technology and said that he “consider[s] the applications that start where there is a lack of effective control mechanisms or trustworthy institutions to be promising. Among other things in foreign trade or development aid, Blockchain’s promise of confidence and efficiency in cryptography and immutability may prove beneficial.”
