Canadian entrepreneur and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O'Leary believes crypto cowboys will soon become a thing of the past, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) casts a legal lasso around two of the industry’s most preeminent firms. In an interview with Decrypt, O'Leary said the SEC’s back-to-back lawsuits against cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Coinbase—unveiled this week—will be remembered as an inflection point within the industry, ultimately leading today’s Wild West notion of crypto toward greener pastures. On June 6, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against Coinbase, alleging that the company violated securities regulations. These are the most notable takeaways from those charges. The SEC said that Coinbase's main trading platform has operated as an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency since 2019. Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal called for Congress to adopt a draft bill laying out a regulatory framework around cryptocurrency transactions right after the Securities and Exchange Commission sued his company for failing to register with the agency. Straying briefly from his prepared remarks to address the lawsuit, Grewal called the SEC’s move “disappointing, but not surprising.” He criticized the agency for what he said is its “reliance on enforcement-only approach”, and said the new rules under the proposed bill were needed to establish clearer regulations for the crypto industry. Institutional investors increasingly are considering investments in tokenised assets as they seek new forms of value — but they face a complex challenge. These investments are tracked on a diverse range of blockchain networks that are not interoperable - each has its own functionality or liquidity profile, which creates significant overhead and friction in managing and trading the assets. Overcoming this fragmentation will be key to the long-term scalability of the market and, aligned with our focus on removing friction in international transactions, we are working with our community to explore a potential solution. In a new set of experiments, we will collaborate with more than a dozen major financial institutions and FMIs including Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ), BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) – to test how firms can leverage their existing Swift infrastructure to efficiently instruct the transfer of tokenised value over a range of public and private blockchain networks. Chainlink, a leading Web3 services platform, will provide connectivity across public and private blockchains for these experiments. You can find these stories and more at the link below:
