There are still industry executives who remain hopeful that the United States will develop legislation to treat crypto fairly, however, the advisor of the Crypto Council for Innovation warns that it will require “a lot of work.”
Speaking to Cointelegraph on March 29 at the World of Web3 (WOW) Summit in Hong Kong, the advisor of the Crypto Council for Innovation and founder of Odsy Network, Sean Lee, said that fair treatment of the crypto industry is possible in the United States.
He pointed out that financial reforms were dealt with after the 2008 financial crisis so there is no reason the same cannot be applied to crypto.
“It’s possible, it will take a lot of work […] and usually the implementation after a major crisis, which we are currently experiencing.
The comments come after a massive crypto crackdown by US financial regulators in what some industry commentators are calling a “war on crypto.”
The crash of FTX 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, just a centralized trading platform, adding:
“If you don’t manage a centralized entity properly, then we’ve seen a lot of history of what can go wrong.”
He said there is a lot of education to be done and this is what organizations such as the Crypto Innovation Council are doing.
The council strives to dialogue with politicians to help them understand what’s going on and “help them also understand what other jurisdictions are thinking,” he said.
The aid could be given to “help create more advanced policies” that allow communities and companies to better understand the landscape.
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Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, made a similar argument in a statement about Binance’s recent CFTC lawsuit, saying that “hopefully it means the end of people coming into the crypto space trying to take advantage of the lack of regulatory clarity in the United States.”
He also said that the CFTC’s classification of certain cryptos as commodities is a “powerful shot across the SEC’s bow.”
In a related development, SEC chairman Gary Gensler has called for a bigger budget to deal with what he called the “Wild West” of the crypto market this week. Therefore, it is unlikely that Uncle Sam’s war on crypto will end anytime soon.