Crypto enforcers wielded a heavy hand this year, but don’t expect it to get softer in 2024

The cryptocurrency market had a banner year in 2018. Crypto values fluctuated more than the April weather in London, and the sector and its advocates had a crazy year due to financing shortages and the public SBF controversy.

Nonetheless, the crypto sector as a whole was highly concerned about the current state of crypto legislation and its enforcement mechanisms. Despite the fact that the presidential elections in 2024 are sure to divert everyone’s attention, many in the cryptocurrency business are holding out hope that more precise regulations will be announced in the next months.

While “2023 has certainly seen some controversies,” according to TechCrunch+ interviewee Jack Vinijtrongjit of web3 infrastructure firm AAG, “in many ways, it has been a lull from the crypto winter and hangover from the crash of FTX and LUNA in 2022.”

In 2022, the business was shaken by many significant scandals, and this year, we got to witness firsthand how the U.S. government responded. The cryptocurrency market has had a very eventful month: In early November, FTX’s previous CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of seven counts of fraud. Following this, Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao resigned last week after pleading guilty to multiple charges brought by various U.S. authorities about his failure to cooperate with American law enforcement.

“The rest of the industry does not need to suffer because of what [Bankman-Fried] has been convicted of,” stated Anthony Sabino, a law professor at St. John’s University’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business. Sabino argued that the sector as a whole shouldn’t be held responsible for the acts of the former FTX CEO. However, he did concede that authorities would look to prevent a repeat of the circumstances that led to FTX’s bankruptcy in the hopes of discouraging similar bad actors.

“In the long run, catching and punishing bad actors is good for an industry, including blockchain,” stated Adam Ettinger, a partner at the legal firm FisherBroyles. “No one wants to go to Thanksgiving dinner and explain how their startup is nothing like Celsius or FTX,” the author writes, emphasizing the short-term solution.

But businesses still want regulators and the government to be more specific and lay out specific regulations.

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