Should the SEC and CFTC Form a New SRO to Regulate Crypto?

Meme-Stock Vacation Is Over

The associate bought the options, and then this allegedly happened:

L. Palmer later reimbursed his former business associate for $1,000 of the funds used to purchase the put options. In the memo section of the check, L. Palmer wrote the words “Blue Horseshoe.”

“Blue Horseshoe” was an apparent reference to Michael Douglas’s instruction to Charlie Sheen in the 1987 movie Wall Street to use a coded message to convey inside information, namely, “[y]ou tell the man that Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel.”

What!? I promise, the SEC has seen “Wall Street.” You’d be better off writing “illegal insider trading” in the memo section of the check. My assumption is that everyone who uses codewords to commit crimes is doing so because it feels cool, not because they want to conceal their crimes.

Former CFTC Chair: Here’s How SEC and CFTC Can Work Together to Regulate Crypto

Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Timothy Massad said current gaps in crypto regulation can be filled if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the CFTC come together to form a self-regulatory organization (SRO).

Massad, now a research fellow at Harvard University’s School of Government, told CoinDesk TV on Monday that as it stands now, “neither agency has the power” to regulate cryptocurrency.

“There is the gap. There’s a gap with respect to regulation of what I would call the cash market for crypto assets, which are not securities,” he said.

Coinbase Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Lapses in Security

Coinbase failed to properly secure customers’ accounts, leaving them vulnerable to theft and unauthorized transfers, a putative class action lawsuit filed against the crypto exchange last week alleges.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, also accuses the company of causing financial harm to users by locking them out of their accounts permanently or for long periods of time, as well as violating federal law by listing securities on its trading platform.

‘Hating ESG’: Advocates Rethink Sustainable Label as Culture Wars, DeSantis Bite

Oxford’s Eccles, who was also the founding chairman of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, defends the concept of ESG, even if he thinks the label has run its course.

Instead, he says he’s happy to talk about “material risk factors.”

“I know it’s a boring term, but it’s accurate,” he said. “We never have to say whether they’re an E, S or G issue. We can say we’re talking about carbon emissions or labor practices.”

In their report on the merits of ESG, analysts at McKinsey argue that while the acronym “may have lost some of its luster, its underlying proposition remains essential at the level of principle. Names will come and go…but we believe that the importance of the underlying ideas has not peaked.”

No Safety Net From Crypto Collapses, German Regulator Warns

Investing in cryptocurrencies could mean you lose all your money because there’s no state-sponsored protection, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin said Monday, in a toughening of previous warnings to retail investors.

***

If trading platforms or wallet providers turn south or go bust, “there is no protection covering customer losses, such as deposit guarantee schemes or investor compensation schemes,” the statement from BaFin says. “Such systems do not exist for crypto assets.”

In contrast, under European Union (EU) law, holdings with conventional banks are usually insured up to the value of 100,000 euros ($99,000), a move designed to protect consumers and prevent market panic turning into a bank run.

Andreessen Horowitz Says Crypto Can Shift Power Away From Big Internet Companies: Report

Chris Dixon, the founder of Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) crypto arm, said the venture capital firm sees Web3 and cryptocurrencies as having the ability to disrupt the power imbalance created by big internet companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

In an interview on FT’s Tech Tonic podcast, Dixon said that power on the internet is currently held by a small group of companies.

“I don’t think this is a good outcome,” Dixon said. “The idea of having the internet controlled by five companies is very bad for entrepreneurs and bad for VCs.”