Regulation is coming

I’ve been interviewing for a Head of Compliance at Secfi and it’s been a welcome change to my usual interview cycle. For one, I’m interviewing more on current knowledge so I get to pick the candidates’ brains quite a bit.

I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations over the last few days discussing Gary Gensler, crypto and where the SEC goes from here.

Crypto companies v. Regulators will be an interesting battle to watch in the coming few months and years. Gensler isn’t wrong when he says this is the wild west right now and perhaps some fair regulation is actually needed. Key to that is that it needs to be fair.

I don’t love how the SEC picked a fight with Coinbase by issuing the Wells Notice preventing them from starting crypto lending. It seemed like they wanted to target Coinbase and didn’t provide much background as to why.

I’m not sure how this all plays out, but one thing I am certain of after speaking to some senior compliance folk is that regulation is coming. It’s going to get harder for companies to launch, especially in the crypto and blockchain space. Startups and companies should prepare accordingly.