Bitcoin [BTC] to be regulated with a “do no harm approach” to innovation, says CFTC’s ‘CryptoDad’

Christopher “CryptoDad” Giancarlo, the Chairman of the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, recently appeared on an interview to speak about the efforts the regulator has been taking regarding the cryptocurrency market. He also spoke about the futures products that they helped launch, along with general problems in the market

The Chair spoke about his regulatory approach to cryptocurrencies, emphasizing that it was a two-handed one. The two prongs of Giancarlo’s regulatory strategy were enforcement efforts and innovation, he revealed.

He went on to say:

“We take a two handed approach. On one hand very strong enforcement efforts. There are a lot of scammers, a lot of fraudsters in this marketplace, and we’re covering the beat for them and where we find them we take them out.”

This is in reference to the scams in the cryptocurrency market that the CFTC is currently cracking down on, Most recent was one with a company known as My Big Coin, which claimed to be was similar to Bitcoin and backed by gold. This led the CFTC to sue the owner, Randall Carter, with commodity fraud and misappropriation of funds.

Giancarlo also mentioned the other half of the approach the CFTC takes towards regulation, stating:

“On the other hand, when it comes to innovation we take a first do no harm approach. We want to see innovation develop and we want to see innovation develop in the United States. To that end, it was under our watch that the very two Bitcoin futures trading products have emerged.”

The Chair also mentioned a report by the San Francisco Federal Reserve, which had interesting findings regarding the products. He went on to say:

“According to the San Francisco Fed, it was the Bitcoin futures emergence that actually sapped the emergence of the Bitcoin bubble in late 2017.  We’ve seen Bitcoin achieve a more sustainable level than it was during the bubble period last year.”

He also spoke about the movement of institutional money into the cryptocurrency market, stating that they were indeed “seeing more” of it. He offered his opinion, stating:

“I think with more institutional movement we should see more maturization of it. We’ve still got a long way to go, there’s still a lot of issues with these spot markets, a lack of transparency, a lot of conflict of interest, a lot of lack of systems and system safeguards and that’s a concern. Like old things, it takes time to mature, and with a lot of institutional investors into the space we’ll see a lot of maturization.”