Cryptocurrency trading and lending platforms that promise returns to investors are wrong to think that they can avoid regulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency’s chair has said.
Gary Gensler told the Financial Times’s Future of Asset Management North America conference on Wednesday that investors in such crypto products deserved the same kind of safeguards against fraud and manipulation as bank depositors or purchasers of insurance policies or mutual funds.
“This crypto space is now certainly of a size that without those investor protections of banking, insurance[and] securities laws [and] market oversight, I do think somebody is going to get hurt,” he said. “A lot of people are likely to get hurt.”