The cryptocurrency ecosystem has come a long way since the launch of Bitcoin (BTC) and in the last few years smart contracts have revolutionized the industry. With that said, there is still plenty of progress to be made when it comes to integrating blockchain technology to peer-to-peer, business to business and business to consumer payment systems.
Alchemy Pay aims to further the adoption of cryptocurrencies through its hybrid payments system and in the last week its ACH token gained 77% to trade at $0.0625 on Feb. 9.
ACH/USDT 4-hour chart. Source: TradingView
Three reasons for the uptick in ACH price include the cross-chain launch of ACH on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), multiple new exchange listings that have helped expand access to the token and the integration of Alchemy Pay with multiple blockchain projects across the ecosystem.
ACH joins Binance Smart Chain
The most significant development for the Alchemy Pay protocol was its launch on the Binance Smart Chain at the end of January.
$ACH is live on the Binance Smart Chain!
ACH (BEP-20) staking campaign to earn $STORE announced soon!
— Alchemy Pay | $ACH (@AlchemyPay) January 30, 2022
Aside from allowing for cheaper transactions for ACH users, the cross-chain integration also helped increase the pool of available investors in ACH through the listing of tokens on BSC-based decentralized exchanges like PancakeSwap.
Alchemy Pay also partnered with Bit.Store to conduct an airdrop of the project’s STORE token as a way to reward community members and encourage future collaborations.
Fresh exchange listings tend to boost altcoin prices
A second factor helping boost the momentum in the price of ACH has been its listing on multiple exchanges, including Binance on Jan. 10.
#Binance will list @AlchemyPay $ACH and @Immutable $IMX https://t.co/smkEblDzRP
— Binance (@binance) January 10, 2022
Other notable exchange listings over the past month include WazirX, CoinEx Global, MEXC Global, ONUS Finance, Tokocrypto and XT Exchange.
Several exchanges, including Binance, have also introduced high-yielding staking products to help attract liquidity and Gate recently added a 3X leveraged ACH instrument.
Related:Cointelegraph Research: Valuing a crypto payment token
Integrations across the crypto ecosystem
A third development that has solidified support for ACH has been the integration of Alchemy Pay with multiple blockchain networks and this should speed up the launch of fiat payments.
Networks and protocols that have integrated Alchemy Pay since mid-December include IoTeX, Avalanche, Polygon, Algorand, NIUM, MakerDAO and SimpleHold.
VORTECS™ data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro began to detect a bullish outlook for ACH on Feb. 8, prior to the recent price rise.
The VORTECS™ Score, exclusive to Cointelegraph, is an algorithmic comparison of historical and current market conditions derived from a combination of data points including market sentiment, trading volume, recent price movements and Twitter activity.
VORTECS™ Score (green) vs. ACH price. Source:Cointelegraph Markets Pro
As seen in the chart above, the VORTECS™ Score for ACH spiked into the green and reached a high of 74 on Feb. 8, around four hours before the price increased 55.5% over the next day.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.
The team behind Shiba Inu, the second largest meme coin by market cap, has announced a metaverse project.
Investors will be able to buy virtual land using Doge Killer (LEASH), another token by the same team.
The world of meme coins is now entering the metaverse. The team behind Shiba Inu, an Ethereum-based token that arguably has little utility but is the 13th biggest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $18.4 billion, have announced a virtual land project.
In a Tuesdayblog post, the developers said they would “lead this Metaverse sector” and will soon release “Shiba Lands” for purchase and auction. The metaverse refers to shared virtual worlds that people can interact with as 3D avatars.
Those who want to get involved ahead of the launch of the meme coin metaverse can do so by buying and holding Doge Killer (LEASH)—another token created by the developer (or developers) behind Shiba Inu.
“Overall, our focus is not only to disrupt the Metaverse industry but many industries in and outside the crypto world,” the blog post read.
New Blog: A METAVERSE Story that begins… with an update!
🏡 Introducing Lands, a queue system, and more!
🦮 $LEASH holders will be the first to gain access to Shiba Inu Metaverse Lands.
Read more… https://t.co/S758ClAbRC
— Shib (@Shibtoken) February 8, 2022
“Therefore we are early, but most importantly, our Metaverse serves as the anchor in our sustainable ecosystem, as we add even more utility, projects, and benefits for our beloved ShibArmy, the best crypto community out there.”
Interested investors will be granted a place in the queue to the Shiba Inu metaverse by holding Doge Killer tokens, the blog post said. They can snap up the virtual land using LEASH tokens when it goes on sale.
Doge Killer’s price is up 48% in the past 24 hours, trading for $1,750, according to CoinMarketCap. Shiba Inu (SHIB) is up 10.75%, at $0.00003353 a token.
A “meme coin” (or “meme token”) is a cryptocurrency that is based-on an internet joke or meme. There is an abundance of them, and they are usually more volatile than other cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Shiba Inu exploded in popularity last year when it burst onto the crypto scene to compete with Dogecoin—the biggest meme coin by market cap. Critics of both Both Shiba Inu and Dogecoin say the coins have no inherent value, but proponents—particularly those of Dogecoin—say the coins can and should be used for payments.
Both meme coins have become popular as internet communities and celebrities, such asElon Musk, havepromoted them online, causing their value to go through the roof (andmake some early investors very rich.)
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.
Like all things, Trezor, a household name in the crypto community with over 1 million units sold, came from humble beginnings. The idea all started out in 2011 after a Bitcoin (BTC) conference in Prague, Czechia — which, by the way, was just voted the most beautiful city in the world in a Time Out magazine survey. Two crypto enthusiasts, Pavol “Stick” Rusnák and Marek “Slush” Palatinus, envisioned a small, single-purpose computer that would securely store users’ Bitcoin private keys.
In 2013, the two founded SatoshiLabs. The following year, the first-ever Trezor wallet — Trezor One — launched. Then came the Trezor Model T, which added a touchscreen to the device. Both are still found on the market worldwide, with their firmware patched each month or so. With the invention of seed recovery and passphrase protection, Trezor set the norm for the industry in terms of hardware wallet security.
During an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Kristýna Mazánková, head of PR at SatoshiLabs, and Josef Tětek, Trezor’s brand ambassador, discusses how Trezor still remains true to its goal of privacy and security after all these years. When asked about the vulnerability of their customers’ data, they said:
“We don’t have any data on our customers [in our servers] because every 90 days, we wipe whatever is stored. So that’s something that is super important to us because we understand that everything is theoretically hackable.”
They noted that, “When it comes to security, the key feature is it’s a standalone physical device. It’s not possible to hack it remotely.”
“If somebody were to get your hardware wallet, there is an additional layers of protection, such as the PIN code, which locks the device. Even if they were to get around that, there’s always the recovery seed.”
Tětek then explained that it’s still not the end of the world if hackers manage to find one’s recovery seed, as the inclusion of a passphrase makes the recovery seed useless by itself. “If you have your Trezor setup, with a recovery seed written down and protected with both PIN and passcode, there’s no way to hack the device at all,” says Tětek. However, he warned:
“Without the passphrase production, there is the possibility to read the seed from the device if you have very specialized equipment.”
When asked about just how on Earth a hacker managed to hack a Trezor wallet and recovered $2 million in ‘lost’ crypto in January, Mazánková and Tětek told Cointelegraph:
“It was like a double coincidence that the owner didn’t update their firmware for five years and didn’t have a password set up. So I think the engineer conducted about 1,000 tries to make sure he didn’t fry the chip before extracting it because if he had one mistake on the chip, he would fry the chip, and the wallet would become non-recoverable.”
Privacy and security aside, since the release of Model One and Model T, there have been additional features, such as doing everything on display, desktop, or web applications when connected. In addition, one can buy and sell Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly to an address via Trezor Suite.
This year Trezor is also focusing on integrating CoinJoin into its hardware wallet. Made possible by Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade last November, CoinJoin collates multiple Bitcoin transactions into a single arrangement to obfuscate who owns which coin afterward, thereby significiantly improving user privacy. Another major update on the table is being able to run one’s own node directly from the Trezor Suite.
Heather Morgan, pictured, cast herself as an expert in “cold email” – unsolicited communications – and posted dozens of rap videos were she adopted her alter-ego, Razzlekhan.
Eyepress – Newscom
Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein raised money from Mark Cuban and other well-known investors. His wife, Heather Morgan, built a following as a quirky rapper and social media luminary.
By Cyrus Farivar, David Jeans and Thomas Brewster
Heather Morgan and her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, seemed to lead a successful life as tech entrepreneurs and thought leaders. Lichtenstein invested in startups alongside heavyweights like Marc Benioff and had launched his own company backed by Mark Cuban. Morgan styled herself as a prolific thought leader, posting online articles about women in leadership, and even had an alter ego as a goofy YouTube rapper called Razzlekhan, who talked about success and money.
But they had a secret, according to investigators with the IRS. Morgan, 31, and her husband, Lichtenstein, 34, were arrested in New York on Tuesday and charged with trying to launder $3.6 billion in bitcoin stolen by hackers from the Bitfinex exchange six years ago. If convicted of the charges against them, each could serve up to 25 years in prison. Court documents unsealed this week detail an elaborate scheme to launder and conceal the origins of the stolen bitcoins. Lichtenstein and Morgan are not charged with perpetrating the hack.
Forbes found that as the pair allegedly used a digital wallet to launder the cryptocurrency, they simultaneously styled themselves as self-made entrepreneurs, investing in companies together and, in Morgan’s case, establishing herself as a social media personality.
Illya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather Morgan, 31, pictured in mugshots, were arrested in Manhattan on Tuesday Feb 8, 2022.
EPN/Newscom
Since meeting about a decade ago, the two worked hard to gain a foothold in Silicon Valley and New York tech circles. Lichtenstein had proceeded through a series of failed ventures, including running a Ron Paul fan website and setting up a brain-boosting supplements business before co-founding MixRank, now a venture-backed sales and marketing company. Lichtenstein left MixRank abruptly in 2016, the same year that Bitfinex was hacked.
During that time, Morgan cast herself as an expert in “cold email” – unsolicited communications – and parlayed that into writing gigs and appearances at sales conferences.
“She came across as a smooth operator but never in a way that raised suspicions,” said Travis Lybbert, a University of California, Davis economics professor, who hired Morgan as a research assistant in 2011. “She was a very confident young person, professional, who would look for opportunities and create them.”
People who knew the couple said they were shocked by the arrests. Lybbert, in a phone interview with Forbes, said Morgan had been a promising student whose understanding of the Middle East was impressive. She “earned a place” as a co-author on the academic book chapter that they wrote together, he said: “Lessons from the Arab Spring: Food Security and Stability in the Middle East and North Africa.”
The professor said that he had given a guest lecture in one of Morgan’s classes when she was a student at UC Davis, and she approached him later, after her graduation, seeking research opportunities that could aid her “graduate studies in economics, especially in international and developmental economics.”
”She was always looking for the next thing and had really high aspirations for what she wanted to do professionally,” Lybbert said.
Lybbert also said that while he and Morgan were working together in 2011 and 2012, Morgan was ambitious and busy. After graduating from UC Davis, she traveled to Hong Kong, where she worked as an event planner, while also applying to graduate school in economics and starting her own copywriting consulting company, SalesFolk, Lybbert said.
According to Morgan’s LinkedIn page, she moved on from Hong Kong to Cairo, where she completed a masters degree in economics and international development at the American University. Morgan returned to California in 2013 and took a job with a company called Tamatem Inc., an Arabic-language mobile-games publisher, which was incubated in 500 Startups. At about the same time, Morgan launched SalesFolk. Archival copies of her website from June 2013 describe her as an “analytics ninja,” a “published author,” and as having seven years of copywriting experience.
It appears she crossed paths with Lichtenstein around this time. Listed as a testimonial at the bottom of her Salesfolk web page is a comment from Lichtenstein, who gave her services a glowing review, calling her “intense, brilliant, and laser focused,” and adding that “a single hour of brainstorming with Heather pays for itself immediately.”
In 2014, Morgan began blogging on her own site, econgoat.com, where she described herself as a “shameless economist in pearls.” In a post on April 14, 2014, she wrote: “While my risk-loving behavior may have brought me more chaos than most people could handle, mixed with some failures, it also led me to my biggest wins.” A few months later, Morgan interviewed Lichtenstein for her own YouTube channel, asking him about his company, MixRank, in a video entitled “Get your first $1 million in enterprise sales with zero marketing spend.”
By now, Morgan was getting recognition beyond her own websites. In August 2015, she was interviewed online by a sales management software company called Ambition, which described her as someone who was “rewriting the playbook on cold email outreach for [software-as-a-service] companies all over the world.” Brian Trautschold, now Ambition’s COO, who did the interview with Morgan, expressed shock that she had been accused of a federal crime. It’s “crazy,” he told Forbes in a phone interview. “She was speaking at SaaS conferences and there was no indication that the person wasn’t focused on consulting on email…It’s a shock, seven-plus years later, to see the other side of the story kind of come out.”
A few months before the Bitfinex hack in August 2016, Morgan became a freelance columnist at Inc. magazine, which described her as having gone from “sleeping on couches to creating a bootstrapped seven-figure business called SalesFolk.” The following year, she also became a contributor to the ForbesWomen section on Forbes.com, where she posted articles about topics ranging from music to food. In one post, Morgan discussed how she had a speech impediment growing up and was bullied by other students in school.
In that 2019 Forbes post, she hinted at previous legal issues: She wrote that during a business trip to Asia, she received unspecific “legal threats,” learned that her employees were “fudging numbers,” and was bullied by longtime friends. Forbes removed her as a contributor in September 2021 during a routine semiannual review.
It was because of professional setbacks like these, she wrote in the Forbes post, that she decided to become a rapper, adopting the name Razzlekhan. In an Instagram post in January 2019, Morgan is wearing a black leather jacket while another woman stands behind her. “So some people in the tech world are a little bit worried about me rapping and are not sure if I should have a rap song, also some corporate people,” she said. “But you know what, I remember just as many people telling me not to take a risk, not to start a company, not to be an entrepreneur.” Many of Razzlekhan’s YouTube videos have been made private or been removed since Tuesday evening.
Morgan and Lichtenstein appeared in a detention hearing Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge.
The Associated Press
Since the Bitfinex hack in 2016, the couple’s online posts show an extravagant lifestyle. Morgan documented their jet-setting from Panama to Malaysia and Mexico on social media platforms.
The same month the alleged hack took place, Morgan posted a photo to Instagram. She and Lichtenstein are sitting on a blue satin couch, laughing. “I always love getting into trouble w/ this crazy guy,” she wrote. “Thanks for always inspiring me to be a better entrepreneur!”
Lichtenstein, for his part, had established himself as a minor player in the New York tech investment world, where, according to the Justice Department, he was living in an apartment at 75 Wall Street, an exclusive block where a typical condo is valued upward of $1 million.
It was an image of success he had been building for a decade. After graduating with a major in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lichtenstein had sought like-minded entrepreneurs and went to Silicon Valley, where he met other techno-libertarians, according to his trail of now-defunct websites and businesses identified by Forbes. One of his more notable sites was RonPaulFan.com, which contained a stream of news and support for the one-time Republican presidential candidate who became a famous advocate for cryptocurrency. According to the site’s banner, it was the “#1 source for all Ron Paul news.”
Lichtenstein also dabbled in selling brain supplements around this time, claiming to have created one called Instant Focus that promised to “turbocharge your productivity,” which he said helped him “code longer and be more productive” in a post on Hacker News in October 2010. He also launched weight loss sites, including MyNaturalWeightLossDiet.com, which was pushing colon cleanses and acai supplements, and what appeared to be a series of dating websites, adultfriendgrinder.com and findgeekgirls.com.
While those enterprises failed to get off the ground, he found more success as co-founder of MixRank, a data-driven-marketing startup, which was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2011. At the time, Lichtenstein was trying to establish himself as a Silicon Valley thought leader, in a blog entitled Influence Hacks. In one post he wrote, “The amount of money you make has nothing to do with how hard you work … What markets really reward is RISK.”
Among early MixRank backers were billionaire investor Mark Cuban and the 500 Startups venture capital fund, according to Pitchbook, but both sold their stakes to an undisclosed buyer sometime between 2012 and 2015. MixRank’s other founder, Scott Milliken, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment at the time of publication. In an email, Cuban said he “never met” Lichtenstein.
Later, Lichtenstein founded a blockchain-based cybersecurity company called Endpass and an investment business called DemandPath, alongside Morgan. In just over a decade, he was also investing in startups. Those included Routable, where he was an angel investor alongside more than a dozen other investors, including billionaire Bay Area heavyweights like Scott Belsky, Box founder Aaron Levie and Salesforce founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff. There is no indication that Lichtenstein knew or communicated with the other investors.
In one LinkedIn post from 2021, Lichtenstein wrote that he was “proud to have been among the earliest investors in Routable.” Omri Mor, cofounder and CEO of Routable responded, “Proud to have you with us from the start.” Mor didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Lichtenstein has not been nearly as prolific on social media as his wife. Over the past decade, his Twitter account was quiet for nearly seven years, from 2013 until 2020. But in January 2021, he complained about what he called “#BigTechCensorship.” Last month, he took aim at the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, lampooning him over a meme he posted. “How wild that billionaires who can do anything in the world choose to prioritize posting second rate memes on Twitter?”
Reached by phone, Liechtenstein’s father, Yevgeniy Lichtenstein, declined to speak about his son’s predicament. “I don’t want to discuss it, I’m sorry,” the elder Lichtenstein said.
A 20-page affidavit written by Christopher Janczewski, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service, accuses Morgan and Lichtenstein of moving the stolen bitcoins “through thousands of transactions to over a dozen accounts” in their own names and businesses. One of those companies was SalesFolk, Morgan’s copywriting consulting company, according to the affidavit.
In June 2019, Morgan allegedly changed a personal bitcoin account to a business account that she had at a specific virtual currency exchange (identified in court documents as “VCE 7”), “in order to receive less scrutiny from VCE 7 about her transactions as she liquidated her BTC in greater volume,” the affidavit reads.
But it was Lichtenstein’s use of a cloud-storage account that led to the unraveling of the alleged plot. The government decrypted a file there that contained a list of 2,000 virtual currency addresses, along with corresponding private keys. Almost all of those addresses were linked to the Bitfinex heist, according to the Justice Department, which said the crypto also passed through entities owned by Morgan.
Lichtenstein and Morgan’s counsel, Anirudh Bansal, did not respond to Forbes’ requests for comment.
During a detention hearing Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge, Morgan and Lichtenstein were ordered released on bond, over prosecutors’ objections. The objections included the fact that Morgan allegedly “tried to lock her cellular phone to prevent law enforcement examination” and that the pair “engaged in extraordinarily complex laundering” of some of the bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex. In the end, however, Chief Judge Beryl Howell ordered the husband and wife to remain in custody. A hearing has been scheduled for Friday.
In August 2019, Morgan gave a lecture on “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything” to a group in New York City. When asked by an audience where the line should be drawn in social engineering, Morgan responded: “I do believe that the ends justify the means sometimes,” she said. “My end goals aren’t bad or evil. I’m not trying to scam someone out of money or get someone hurt in any way.”
Aave (AAVE), the decentralized finance lending platform, launched the Lens Protocol ecosystem on the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain as their way to challenge centralized social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. What started with an open letter to garner support around the idea that content creators should own and control their digital identities, led to developing a Web3-native social network powered by NFTs.
In a Twitter Spaces conversation the company hosted this week, Stani Kulechov, CEO and Founder of Aave, described the mission behind Lens Protocol.
“We wanted to build a social media protocol, or essentially a social graph, and make those profiles on-chain, following the relationships on-chain and creating a permissionless way to distribute content between a creator and the audience.”
Kulechov and his developer team dug into the problems with current social media platforms. According to one of the developers who goes by @Zer0dots on Twitter, “We’re people. We’re not products. We’re not numbers nor data points.” He’s referring to content on users’ feeds, whether it’s a photo on Instagram or a Tweet, that Meta or Twitter can sell as data to marketers. He described how Lens Protocol wants to make the move away from “users being the products” to giving creators enough ownership to choose how their content is distributed.
1/ Something is blooming… https://t.co/UMUs3qT3SD
— LensProtocol.eth (@LensProtocol) February 7, 2022
Basically, the protocol enables users to create a profile, which is a fully composable NFT. These dynamic NFTs contain the history of all posts, reposts, comments, and other content generated including music, commentary, art, photography and video. A key difference is that profiles are tied to a wallet address, and owners can choose how to monetize their content. A follower can also collect someone else’s publication and receive a tradable follow NFT.
“And you can choose who gets to collect them,” said @Zer0dots. “You can choose what logic gets executed. Is there is a fee? Is it a bonding curve that is subscription? Or is it only specific addresses you want? There’s so many different options.”
During the Twitter Spaces session, the Aave team also suggested the possibility of turning profiles into a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. A follower can opt in to have voting and delegation power over what could be a DAO profile.
Related: First cross-chain governance proposal passes on Aave
Aave likened this new ecosystem to an open source “developer garden” where they invite the community to “grab fertilizer” and build upon the protocol, anything from social apps and analytics platforms to DAO tooling. The company’s goal is to mirror real-life social interaction that isn’t tied to a platform’s changing algorithms and policies.
For now, the Lens Protocol code is available to test on the Polygon Mumbai Testnet. According to Kulechov, Polygon was the chain of choice due transaction speed and cost effectiveness, and since applications can be deployed to any chain because it’s Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible.
XRP took off on a massive 50% price rally over the past five days, moving up a couple of spots in the market cap rankings as a result.
The crypto asset was trading around $0.60 on February 3rd and surged all the way past $0.90 at one point on Tuesday.
The price increase ballooned XRP’s market capitalization to more than $42.26 billion, surpassing the smart contract platforms Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL) to reach 6th in the market cap rankings. This places XRP behind Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT), Binance Coin (BNB) and USD Coin (USDC).
Crypto analytics firm Santiment notes on Twitter that XRP was outputting the same number of daily active addresses at one point on Monday while trading at $0.82 as it did in early November when it was priced all the way up at $1.18.
Source: Santiment/Twitter
Eleanor Terrett, a journalist at Fox Business Network, has also reported on new developments in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) lawsuit against Ripple.
The SEC filed a lawsuit in December 2020 alleging that Ripple sold XRP as a security during its launch. The regulator also alleges that the token remains a security to this day.
Terrett reports that people associated with the case think it will stretch into this summer.
Breaking — per @EleanorTerrett, people associated with the @SECGov case against @Ripple believe case will stretch into the summer but worry that the pending @WhiteHouse report on crypto could negatively impact @Ripple’s case by possibly classifying $XRP as a security more at 130
— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) February 7, 2022
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Technology giant Apple is introducing a new contactless payment function to iPhones that could result in direct Bitcoin (BTC) or crypto payments.
Today, Apple announced the new Tap To Pay function on iPhones, a feature available to merchants across the United States.
The new feature will allow businesses to accept ‘tap’ payments from iPhone users via Apple Pay, credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets. While the company hasn’t addressed it directly yet, being able to use digital wallets would presumably allow users to make payments with crypto, unless otherwise restricted by Apple.
According to the announcement, all Tap To Pay transactions will be encrypted and processed using Secure Element, the same security technology used by Apple Pay. Apple says customers of payments giant Stripe will be the first Apple iPhone users with access to Tap To Pay.
Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, said,
“As more and more consumers are tapping to pay with digital wallets and credit cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone will provide businesses with a secure, private, and easy way to accept contactless payments and unlock new checkout experiences using the power, security, and convenience of iPhone…
In collaboration with payment platforms, app developers, and payment networks, we’re making it easier than ever for businesses of all sizes — from solopreneurs to large retailers — to seamlessly accept contactless payments and continue to grow their business.”
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Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), is pushing for his agency to take a leading role in regulating digital assets. He maintains that his agency is well positioned to provide market protection for consumers and reduce risks in the space.
Behnam made his case for expanding the CFTC’s authority in a letter to the House and Senate Agriculture Committees on Tuesday. Heassertedthat his agency already follows core principles that help sufficiently oversee a wide range of markets, and that the crypto market isn’t an exception.
The dispute on how crypto should be classified is a major source of tension between U.S. regulators and top industry players. While both the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission remain confident that current laws may be adequate, exchanges such as Coinbase arearguinga new federal regulator be created just for cryptocurrencies.
But that appears unlikely. Areportin October suggested that the Biden Administration was planning an executive order to organize research and regulation of crypto among pre-existing agencies.
Behnam emphasized the need for better regulations soon, given the number of retail participants involved in crypto trading.
“In my opinion,” he said, “there are important principles missing from the current regulatory framework applicable to digital asset markets that we see in other federally regulated markets, particularly ones that primarily cater to retail investors.”
Senate testimony
Earlier on Wednesday, Behnamtestifiedbefore the Senate to elaborate on his position. Industry executives including FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried also attended.
“The digital asset market, which at present is most directly supervised through state money transmitter licenses, is unique, and presents many novel issues for the CFTC, given our limited authority to police these volatile markets,” Behnam added.
Bankman-Fried, in agreeing with Behnam, said he’d prefer the CFTC help provide more regulatory clarity, adding, “I would love to see the CFTC play a more active role.”
But a big problem is that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler feels the same way about his own agency,vyingfor more control of various aspects of crypto markets and deeming “most” cryptocurrencies—possibly including stablecoins—securities.
“There are thousands of these projects, basically trying to raise money from the public so that they can back an entrepreneurial idea,” Gensler told CNBC last month. “That part’s all right—that, in fact, is called innovation—but it’s about bringing it into the securities laws.”
