In our recent article Staking and Liquid Staking: a Primer we covered the fact that staking is rapidly becoming a substantial ecosystem of its own, including via increasing uptake from institutional investors. We explained the differences between simply staking tokens and liquid staking, which enables investors to pledge their tokens but also achieve liquidity by receiving a new token known as a liquid staking token (LST) or liquid staking derivative (LSD), which is typically deployed in decentralized finance (DeFi) to earn yield or other benefits. Sounds great, so what’s the catch? Well, in addition to the potential catches inherent in any young and relatively untested technology – crypto generally but…
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Crypto’s Illness: Regulatory Reluctance
Pending court decisions challenge SEC’s failed ‘regulation by enforcement’ strategy
The U.S. crypto industry has been learning a rough lesson in regulatory compliance in the past few months. With fines, cease and desist orders, agency warnings, and traditional finance counterparties withdrawing from the industry, it is becoming increasingly apparent that crypto has a compounding problem. Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper. The origin of this isn’t FTX, Voyager Digital, Terra Luna, or any other of the business failures or frauds of 2022. Those are symptoms of another disease. The sickness that’s causing crypto to fumble in front of U.S. regulators and counterparties goes all the way back to the founding principles of Bitcoin…
