CFTC

“Greenspan and Summers and Levitt of the SEC waged war against the CFTC doing its job of regulating subprime instruments. They each, in turn, called up Brooksley Bourne, who was the boss, a lady of iron nerve and principle. They harangued her, saying, what are …”

“We, every single contract we file with the CFTC, and they have 24 hours to stop it.”

“Not, well, the biggest they said no to was the elections. That's why we had to end up suing them. They said no for two years.”

“So, so rarely does it work, and even if you win, you will probably lose. Like, you will end up getting killed in the process.”

“And we put out two cases of two weeks ago of two insiders that then because we're also regulated, we're able to charge them a lot of fines. We charge them over five times what they made and all those things they banned and all that.”

“Like every single trade on Kaoshi goes to the CFTC, they have every single thing, every single case goes to the CFTC for them to review.”

“Right around twenty-twenty-one, twenty-twenty-two, every week my clients would get a subpoena from Gary Gensler or from the CFTC, and were faced with this onslaught of regulation by enforcement. They were faced with regulations that did not work for their busi…”

“Another key piece of our agenda has also been modernizing and upgrading our rules and regulations for on-chain software systems, blockchain networks, and other types of Digital asset products regardless of legislation.”

“Having a regime in place that says, go build, don't ask us for permission, but we need to study that work with the market participants, understand the risks and On our end, we need to set up guardrails.”

“So I compare it to two fortresses with no man's land in between. And so the no man's land is littered with the bodies of would be products that people were unsure. Like, is it CFTC? Is it SEC? And the crossfire between the two just killed the products.”

“We have a memorandum of understanding that the two agencies are working on hammering out and getting In place that will allow us to share information, coordinate on specific issues, and make sure that we don't have this turf battle between the two agencies goi…”

“So my dream is one day that, and I hope we can achieve that here in the next couple of years to have like a super app approach where, you know, there is, okay, blurred lines between the two, but we've coordinated our approach.”

“And so now is the time to put out guidance and make sure that we're not regulating by enforcement as the prior administration did. But we are setting standards. We are making clear what our statute says, and that is that these contracts cannot be listed if the…”

“From my perspective one thing for new products that the CFTC has is called self-certification. So for repetitive products that you know, once you go ahead and approve the general type of framework for it then it's self-certification by the markets and by the p…”

“There was one part of FTX that didn't implode with the rest of it. And that was their investment in a swaps trading platform called ledger X was, which was supervised by the CFTC and examined and they had they had their accounts segregated and all that. So no …”

“So in other countries where we operate, like in the UK or in Singapore, they only have one federal regulator for financial services. So they actually don't care whether these are commodities or securities. It's a totally parochial issue in the United States th…”

“So when FTX imploded, Ledger X didn't really miss a beat. And the, they had segregated accounts. So every customer's assets were accounted for. And you know, nothing as far as I know was lost. And so then Ledger X has survived and now you know, was sold out of…”

“That's our goal is to come out with rules that differentiate between what's the stock, Security, and what is a commodity where the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, can oversee. So meme coins and all that, and stable coins, those are not for the…”

“So in 24, we won the fight against the government. We won that, that we sued the government and then we won that fight in October seven, 24.”

“It's the first time that sports, like, trading on sports is actually legal in all 50 states. Because we are regulated by the, you know, by the feds, like, at the federal level, not state by state. And the federal regulation, like, the law actually supersedes s…”

“When Juan and I brought it up to Alfred and from Sequoia and then YC, we're like, Hey, we're going to sue the government, our regulator. And they're like, we, it's never a good idea. It's just a bad pattern, but we took the risk”

“So we won this month, and the cool thing now is, like, it's the first time in a hundred years that betting on the election, trading on the election is actually legal in the U.S., It's finally back to actually being legal, and this time it's actually regulated,…”

“We later settled with them after I think like two or three years of dealing with this issue. It was like a 400,000 dollar total settlement. Still paying for it to this day.”

“There's a bill called Fit 21, which was sponsored by Patrick McHenry. It's a very simple bill, and elegant in that way, in the sense that it just simply says that the SEC would have jurisdiction over digital securities, and the CFTC would have jurisdiction ove…”

“The Fed is denying licenses to crypto banks and Treasuries making negative statements about crypto and then SCC is attacking and all these CFTC is attacking, all these guys are attacking at the same time.”

“The first person on the company was Jeff Bandman who's, who's actually pretty publicized now, which was really cool. I love that. But Jeff, you know, is the only lawyer that basically took up our kind of like gays at the time. And he was ex CFTC.”

“We need Congress to pass some legislative framework that puts the puck in one side of the arena, a rink or the other. And otherwise, otherwise all this gray is going to exist for a long time.”

“Because you need a CFTC license for it, and basically none of the you know, none of the crypto native exchanges have that.”

“By law, we can't have more than three members of the commission of the same political party.”

“We were the first Real regulator to be from a government perspective to touch crypto assets. And there were two reasons. A few years earlier, it had been determined by the agency that Bitcoin is a commodity.”

“If you look up the definition of commodity in the Coney Exchange Act, there's pretty much everything. Like if it's not a security, it's a commodity. So it naturally sort of fell to us because it wasn't clearly defined as a security.”

“Historically, we are a market that helps mitigate, in many respects, climate risk. It's certainly commercial risk for a farmer or rancher to be able to know that someone's going to be able to buy their harvest at the end of the season, but ultimately, if you'r…”

“Is it fair to say that climate change currently is going to cause financial stability or a financial crisis? No, not at the time. But if we have to think about climate change going forward for decades, and when you have these micro shocks across the country, w…”

“Climate risk is very unique as compared to traditional financial market risk. It's not linear in the sense that it's predictable, and then you can rely on past quarters or past performance to predict future outcomes. It is a lot of unknowns, and we need to be …”

“Although we have different particular metrics with which we stress test institutions for traditional financial stress in the U.S., Those would be relevant, but the more important thing would be to make sure that we coordinate and do it on a consistent basis in…”

“Number one recommendation was carbon price.”

“And it's been, one of their rulings said that Bitcoin is a commodity, so it falls under their jurisdiction.”