Former Currency Comptroller Says Crypto Needs Freedom to Grow

The former senior US bank regulator said today that Washington is “overtly hostile to crypto” at D.C. Fintech Week, a conference in Washington hosted by Georgetown University’s Law Center.

Brian Brooks was Comptroller of the Currency under the previous White House and is now CEO of Bitfury.

“This is in fact a political issue,” Brooks said. “The leadership in power at the moment is devoted to reining this in if not destroying it, and a number of the things I’ve heard, even in the last 24 hours in D.C., have convinced me of that.”

…

He went on to compare the current state of the digital asset industry to the financial sector following the 2008-09 global financial crisis and Silicon Valley following the dotcom bubble burst. Brooks compared the collapse of Celsius, Terra, and Three Arrows Capital to the financial meltdown caused by overleveraging in parts of the financial sector during the crisis, which he argued represented a relatively small portion of the overall financial sector.

We agree and would take it further. The crypto market today is like the Internet in the early 1990s – its potential and transformative power is yet unrealized and even unimagined by the man on the street. A hostile regulatory framework could have smothered the Internet in its cradle in those early days, just as it could the potential of Web3.