All eyes are on Bitcoin (BTC), with the largest cryptocurrency shooting up past $40,000 on Monday. Unsurprisingly, the price increase happened shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the electric-car company would potentially accept BTC payments once more miners confirm green energy initiatives. Yet, while Musk’s tweet may have driven the price of Bitcoin up, some industry experts believe that Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency that should be leveraged. For example, during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami, Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Avanti Financial, said that unlike other cryptocurrencies, solvency matters more than …
As pointed out by Caroline Malcolm, Head of International Policy at Chainalysis, the transparent nature of blockchain technology makes it relatively easy for crypto intelligence companies to track funds related to sanctioned entities. “We're in quite a unique position because of the transparency and the permanency and the immutability of that public record”, explained Malcolm in an exclusive Cointelegraph interview. Governments around the world have expressed concerns that Russia could use crypto to evade sanctions imposed as a response to its military offensive against Ukraine. Addressing those concerns, Malcolm pointed out that in the last few years there has been …
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s chairperson Gary Gensler announced this month that the crypto industry should not escape the purview of the regulator. He highlighted that decentralized finance (DeFi) trading and lending protocols need particular attention when it comes to investor protections. Regulation can extend into a menu of options that covers custody, reporting, counterparty verification and asset classification and issuance. Reports are surfacing that people are waiting with bated breath on how the SEC will regulate the DeFi industry, but Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, also known as BaFin, has found a way to apply existing securities …
On Dec. 8, top executives from six major crypto companies faced the United States House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee during a special hearing on digital assets. While the tone of the conversation was largely proclaimatory, the industry reacted with an optimistic buzz — it seems that crypto is bound to become a hot topic on the Hill for years to come. The meeting that took place in Congress also garnered much attention from mainstream media. What’s notable is the fact that this hearing is the first time that the industry’s senior leaders (aka “crypto moguls”) directly expressed the fears …
In October, Toronto-based Coinsquare became the first crypto trading business to get dealer registration from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC). That means a lot as now Coinsquare investors’ funds enjoy the security of the Canadian Investment Protection Fund in the event of insolvency, while the exchange is required to report its financial standing regularly. This news reminds us about the peculiarities of Canadian regulation of crypto. While the country still holds a rather tight process of licensing the virtual asset providers, it outpaces the neighboring United States in its experiments with crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), pension funds’ …