Billionaire Mark Cuban believes that the SEC could have saved American customers from FTX if it had adopted a Japanese approach to regulating cryptocurrencies. Former agency lawyer John Reed Stark disagreed.
“When FTX collapsed, no one at FTX Japan lost money,” wrote the businessman.
Stark countered, saying the allegations were overblown. He acknowledged some mistakes by the SEC, but stressed that the regulator saved investors millions, perhaps billions, in losses.
The lawyer compared the collapses of FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, Terra and Voyager to “garbage-bin fires”.
The former agency representative also noted that the crypto industry seeks regulatory clarity. However, when authorities propose new rules, the community protests and resists.
In response Cuban said the best way to prevent fraud in digital assets is to implement “clear investor-protection rules”.
“Anyone who does not register with the SEC is de facto breaking the rules, cannot operate and will be shut down. That is how the regulator protects investors,” the entrepreneur says.
Stark noted, in turn, that the Commission charged Binance, Coinbase, Beaxy and Bittrex only months after informing them of non-compliance. In his view, the companies chose to “ignore the SEC and profit for as long as possible without registering”.
This is not the first time Cuban and Stark have clashed over regulation. In June, the billionaire accused the former official of bias, saying the SEC “is throwing crypto under the bus”.
Earlier, John Reed Stark predicted a long struggle between crypto exchanges and the agency. He urged clients of trading platforms to “stop using them right away”.