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SkyBridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci on Wednesday implied that developments in crypto markets could leave regulators in the dust if they don’t move to quickly provide rules for the nascent digital-asset sector.
“If they are going to regulate it they better do it quickly,” Scaramucci told CNBC about crypto, during an interview on the sidelines of a financial markets conference, known as SALT, in New York hosted by SkyBridge.
Scaramucci’s comments follow an interview earlier on the business network with Gary Gensler, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said a number of crypto assets should be considered securities under regulatory rules and therefore fall within the oversight of the SEC’s provisions for investor protections.
Read: SEC Chair Gensler defends Reddit, GameStop investors’ right to ‘smash’ short sellers
Gensler, a former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, taught a course on bitcoin and blockchain at MIT Sloan School of Management, but has been tougher on the crypto industry than had been expected by virtual-asset supporters.
CNBC
Last week, the chief executive of Coinbase Global
COIN,
Brian Armstrong, in a series of tweets, disclosed a dispute between Gensler’s SEC and the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange over a lending program that the regulator deems to securitize a virtual currency.
Armstrong called the SEC’s decisions “sketchy” and characterized its oversight as “intimidation tactics behind closed doors.”
Gensler and other SEC officials have argued that the rules around what is and isn’t a security are fairly clear.
For his part, Scaramucci is a self-proclaimed crypto bull and was one of the first hedge funds to invest in digital assets. On Thursday, he said that SkyBridge entities had invested some $700 million in crypto thus far.
Meanwhile, bitcoin
BTCUSD,
the world’s most prominent digital asset, was trading up 3.4% at $48,199.51 on CoinDesk, while Ether
ETHUSD,
on the Ethereum blockchain was changing hands at $3,516.99, up 4.2%. Ether is up 377% in the year to date, while bitcoin has advanced 67% over the same period.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
the S&P 500
SPX,
and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
indexes, meanwhile, were all trading solidly higher in up-and-down Wednesday action, with year-to-date gains of 14%, 19% and over 17%, respectively.
Scaramucci compared the regulatory environment around crypto to ride-sharing companies such as Uber Technologies
UBER,
which faced regulatory headwinds globally as it tried to grow its novel business.
