Coinbase is now urging the United States government to establish a cryptocurrency regulator in order to keep the country from falling behind other governments across the globe.
In a new policy proposal released yesterday, the crypto exchange platform pointed out that governmental oversight over the digital assets market was necessary. Building upon a similar and recent proposal from one of its investors Andreeson Horowitz, the company said that the creation of a new agency focusing specifically on cryptocurrencies would be ideal as rearranging current financial regulators would not work as they mainly focused on traditional markets.
“We started where a lot of people start, which is taking the existing multiplicity of regulators and trying to figure out what minimal surgery you could do to make things work,” explained Coinbase’s chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad. “And then there was a point at which, maybe three to four weeks ago, where we just kind of looked at each other [and] we said it takes more effort to try to adapt the current system which is predicated on an old market structure — more intellectual effort, I would say — than it does starting from scratch.”
Coinbase warned that without a crypto regulator in the country, the U.S. will be “at risk of becoming a ‘taker’ of regulation as opposed to the primary ‘shaper’ of modern financial services — a position the United States has long occupied.” Shirzad also revealed that the company has already had discussions with around three dozen lawmakers’ offices and numerous related agencies over Coinbase’s proposal, and so far feedback from Capitol Hill has been “welcoming.”
In other crypto-related news, Big Short investor Michael Burry has called Shiba Inu tokens “pointless.”
