Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Chris Giancarlo asserts that the SEC shares some of the blame for the dominance of memecoins in the current market cycle.
Amid the dominance of memecoins in crypto over the past year, a key question has become what is driving the rise.
While the discussion has long been around the allure of the sector’s high reward potential, disillusionment with the promise of altcoins, and worsening economic conditions, a rising theory suggests that regulators, specifically the Securities and Exchange Commission, could also be to blame.
The latest to champion this view is a former top market regulator.
A Disruption in Crypto’s Natural Evolution
Former Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Chris Giancarlo has asserted that the SEC shares some of the blame for the dominance of memecoins in the current market cycle.
Giancarlo shared this view while speaking on a recent episode of the Thinking Crypto podcast, citing the agency’s barrage of enforcement actions with altcoins at the center.
“They [the SEC] attacked anything with value associated with it. So they created a landscape where memecoins effectively worthless were the only thing you could do,” he asserted.
The former top market regulator argued that the SEC’s so-called crypto regulation by enforcement campaign, which he slammed as an “abuse of authority,” had retarded the industry’s natural evolution.
Giancarlo is not the only one who has expressed this view in recent times.
Aligning with Changpeng Zhao
Recently, when trying to explain why the market seems to be gravitating more toward memecoins than utility tokens, former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao also pointed to the SEC.
“During the last four years, a powerful regulatory agency sued almost anyone with any utility token, falsely claiming they are securities. So, people started to launch memes,” he wrote.
The recent finger-pointing comes as there is a growing feeling that the memecoin craze is spiraling out of control, from dangerous promotional stunts to presidents raising ethical concerns about personal launches.
Still, the supposed conditions that nurtured this market environment may soon be set to improve as the regulatory climate in the U.S. appears to have taken a pro-crypto turn under the President Donald Trump administration.
The SEC, for one, has launched a crypto task force to inform sensible crypto regulations and clean up the perceived regulatory mess created by the former administration.
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