🪙 Crypto collapse triggers a multi-year enforcement and litigation wave

“In the US, we have a lot of other regulators that can prosecute cases, like the DFS in New York. ... there will be a lot of action on this over the next couple of years.”

“it's the worst kept secret in crypto, how much insider trading is going on amongst the organizations that run the exchanges and their side pockets that they use to manage liquidity. I mean, this is the biggest thing that's been happening in crypto.”

“there may not be a law in the books about front running NFTs, but there are laws on the books about fraud and NFT and conspiracy to, you know, grift people out of their money. So this is all going to come crashing down, and the discovery is going to be next level.”

“And I think the SEC, now that everybody's lost their money, is going to just tick off one firm after another. And it's going to be massive settlements. It's going to be three or four years of litigation.”

“He goes on some podcast, tells Bloomberg that VCs are going to get pinched for insider trading all these tokens. And lo and behold, on the Wall Street Journal, three guys, I guess a guy at Coinbase, got pinched for basically insider trading these token sales.”

“The first investigation by the House of Representatives needs to be SBF and FTX, not Hunter Biden.”

“It also touches regulators. It could touch, you know, it's a big deal.”

“if you get money some way, but it comes from somebody who fraudulently acquired that money, you have to give the money back. So in this example, what it would mean is if that they can show that that $15 million that this guy got came from SBF basically raiding the piggy bank of user accounts, he's going to have to pay the money back.”

“As I understand it, based on just what I've read, that there's a 90-day rule around contributions, meaning that if, I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound.”

“And I think there will be a subsequent domino to fall, which is now that Gary G, head of the SEC, has FTX and the FTT tokens as the grift, he's going to go down the list of other tokens.”

“So I think it's hard to argue that there isn't a concerted effort now to crack down on crypto by a wide variety of government agencies and authorities, starting with Gensler at the SEC, who seems incredibly hostile to crypto.”

“So I think Gensler had to pivot very hard from at a minimum being very pro FTX and there's all kinds of stories about his interrelatedness with Sam and his family to very anti-BIT or anti-crypto in general. That's clearly happened.”

“Because it looks like that this anonymity has effectively been reverse engineered and there's no anonymity at all. And so what Bitcoin is quickly becoming is like the most singular honeypot of transactional information that's complete and available in public.”

“And if anything, it's cleaned up the Bitcoin community tremendously. And I think it's dispelled this idea that the only thing you'd use Bitcoin for is black market transactions.”

“And so they're coming down hard, and they're going to go and systematically dismantle the largest actors, and they're going to go through the value chain. So I think the obvious place that they're looking now are the exchanges, they'll look at the custodial services, they will not approve any ETFs.”

“Their function is to protect investors. Investors lost a bunch of money. Therefore, they are going to retroactively inflict pain and hold people accountable for their mandate, which is to protect investors.”

“However, the case against Coinbase, they're alleging a completely different set of facts, which is effectively what Gensler and the SEC are saying is that it is not legal to operate a crypto exchange in the United States.”

“But as the retail market took their hits, the SEC has to step in and Congress steps in and everyone starts to say it's time to act, we should have acted sooner.”

“And it really handcuffs the SEC. What are they going to do about Coinbase and every other exchange? I mean, if they're not selling securities, I think Coinbase and everybody else has always maintained they're selling tokens.”

“It's a judgment that seems to indicate for a lot of folks that these are not going to be treated as securities.”

“You just had Biden veto a bill that would have finally given crypto a regulatory framework in the US. It passed with 60 votes in the Senate, including Democrats like Chuck Schumer, and it still wasn't good enough.”

“You got the crypto guys who just want a framework. They just want the government to tell them how to operate and they can't get that.”