Cardano (ADA) creator Charles Hoskinson says that the US needs a new system for regulating crypto.
In a new interview on Thinking Crypto, the CEO of the technology company behind the blockchain platform Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), says that current regulatory approaches do not work well with crypto assets.
“The US needs to move to a functional regulation system instead of a definitional system. We’ve moved beyond the world that something’s a commodity and something’s the currency and something’s a security.
It needs to be regulated based on how it’s used. You need a different regulatory system and that doesn’t really map so well in the US because, usually, what we do is we create a regulatory body for an asset type: the CFTC handles commodities, derivatives as the Securities Exchange Commission handles securities…
We need to move to a system for regulation that has much better definitions of things. We don’t really have a good definition of virtual asset service provider in the United States. We don’t really have a definition of what is a utility token, versus a security token, these types of things. We need a better functional model and we need a better asset definitional model and they need to be applied together.”
Hoskinson says a new enforcement approach is also needed, saying that private financial surveillance does not work for crypto. He explains the downsides of the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) that traditional financial institutions, such as banks, currently submit if they detect potential cases of illegal money transactions.
“That means 99% of the time, it’s not the IRS discovering something on its own, or the SEC discovering something. It’s actually reported to them by a financial intermediary.
When you remove all these financial intermediaries, suddenly you have this issue that you have made all the regulators blind. They actually don’t know what’s going on. They can’t see things.”
Hoskinson then proposes an approach that is suited for crypto.
“I think the solution to it is just through open standards. Basically saying, we can build into the transaction, into the settlement of the transaction itself, as some adherence to regulation. That’s not necessarily compulsory. It can be optional, but it’s something that you can do.”
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