Circle CEO: Lack of Clarity From SEC is Biggest Hurdle in Crypto Space

Circle’s CEO and co-founders Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville initiated an ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit On Thursday (January 10th). ‘Circle’ is a crypto finance company headquartered in Boston, also is backed by huge firms like Goldman Sachs, Bitmain, Baidu, and IDG Capital among others.

They talked about Circle’s interaction with financial regulators, chiefly. They also shed light on subjects like Circle’s contributions to open source projects, privacy coins, mainstream adoption of crypto, and of course, the current bear market.

Here, Jeremy Allaire stated replying to a question that the biggest regulatory issue exists in the crypto market is the lack of clarity from the United States securities regulator regarding how to define various crypto assets. In his words, “The biggest and most immediate regulatory hurdle we face is the lack of specific guidance from the SEC on how to classify various crypto assets. We believe many are clearly currencies and commodities, and there needs to be more specificity on what are really securities. This can unlock a lot of market activity, and also clearly enable the growth of a market for crypto-based securities.”

Talking about tax law, Allaire noted that there should be different tax treatment for crypto to crypto. Giving an example of France govt., he said that they are soon passing a law where there will be no taxes on crypto-to-crypto transactions.

In the session, they discussed Circle’s contribution to the crypto economy in 2018. Giving quick recap, they considered 2018 as a particularly eventful year in Circle’s six-year history. Further, they pointed out the acquisition of Poloniex and the launch of ‘Circle Invest’. Moreover, Robert Bench, chief compliance officer and head regulatory counsel for Circle was also part of the AMA session. He unveiled that Circle may deploy privacy coins in the risk assessment of their customers. As he acknowledges that both Privacy and AML are two immediate priorities of regulators, he says that he “wouldn’t underestimate the ability of smart industry and government participants to find solutions to provide transparency on these coins.”

Notably, Circle was established in October 2013 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments technology company. Its only initial product was “Circle Pay.” At present, Circle Pay can be used in 29 countries in British pounds, US dollars and euros.

Ruti Vora

Ruti regularly contributes in-depth news articles for leading cryptocurrencies. She contributes technical chart-based price updates and analysis pieces on the world's leading digital currencies.

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