Should crypto be regulated like shares – or more like a casino?

‘Crypto assets are commodities,’ said my neighbour at dinner. No they’re not, I replied, commodities are natural raw materials that have ultimate real-world uses. Crypto is merely a collection of blips in cyberspace to which adherents choose to attribute value. ‘Just like fiat currencies,’ my neighbour shot back. ‘What’s real about them? Aren’t they just an idea in the mind of central bankers?’

And off we went on a ding-dong debate. A pity the US Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Gary Gensler wasn’t there to offer his theory that bitcoin, crypto’s market leader, is big enough to be a commodity but that lesser imitators are ‘securities’ (that is, investments bought with the expectation of profit from the efforts of their founders and promoters) which should be regulated like shares. Today’s crypto arena, says Gensler, is akin to the 1920s stock market, riddled with hucksters and fraudsters. Hence his launch of charges against Binance and Coinbase, the world’s biggest crypto exchanges, for illegal securities trading.