While US and Canadian regulators finally started the Operation Cryptosweep to clean up fraudulent crypto companies, the EU is still watching from the sidelines. It’s time to act unless Europe want’s to get benched in the blockchain economy.
On 29 August 2018 NASAA issued the following press release:
More than 200 Active Investigations by State and Provincial Securities Regulators
The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), an organization composed of securities regulators from the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Mexico announced yesterday that right now more than 200 active investigations by state or provincial-level agencies into initial coin offerings (ICOs) and other crypto-related investment products are currently underway by state and provincial securities regulators as part of NASAA’s ongoing initiative “Operation Cryptosweep.” Since its launch in May, this initiative has resulted in 46 enforcement actions involving ICOs or cryptocurrency-related investment products.
So the US, Canada, Mexico as well as China as we already reported in our article: Chinese regulators LEARNT LESSONS IN P2P LENDING MARKET AND CRACK DOWN ON CRYPTO, are cleaning up their space.
And actually, we think that this is just great! The sooner the regulators clean up the crypto scene, the sooner all the fraudsters will be eliminated, the institutional investors will come in and the retail investors are no longer ripped off. We like that scenario.
But what about the European regulators? The hype in Switzerland got slowed down mainly by banks denying to offer bank accounts for crypto companies to avoid any AML risks (and probably they are right). FINMA (Eidgenössische Finanzmarktaufsicht) on the other hand acted in the ENVION case only after having received a load of investor complaints. The EU Blockchain Observatory is probably just watching, BAFIN does not even go after all these German MLM Mining PONZI schemes like OMNIA, NEXUS, USI-Tech although the rest of the world already banned them.
We can just shout out loud to the European regulators: Get going, we lose critical time compared to the US and China! Every defrauded investor is a lost investor for the promising Blockchain technology.
As always Preston Bryne is just great for summarizing the situation:
https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1034525514424348673?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
