BITCOIN

India’s market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), says the decentralized nature of crypto assets makes consumer protection and regulatory enforcement challenging. SEBI on Crypto Regulation The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) reportedly told the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance that the decentralized nature of crypto assets makes any consumer protection or regulatory enforcement of this asset class challenging. Noting that “crypto assets are maintained in decentralized distributed ledgers,” SEBI was quoted by local media as saying: There is a great likelihood of execution of unauthorized trades not in consonance with any regulatory framework. The market regulator emphasized the need for clarity about whether crypto assets are securities. “If crypto assets are not banned, then there is a need for feature-based characterization of the tokenized version of the assets, which may attract supervision of different sectoral regulators,

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly investigating Binance’s BNB token, which could be an unregistered security. If the cryptocurrency is found to be a security, it could put Binance in a similar position to Ripple Labs which has been in an ongoing lawsuit with the SEC over the sale of the XRP token. SEC Investigates Binance’s BNB Crypto The U.S. SEC is investigating whether Binance Holdings Ltd. breached securities laws when it conducted an initial coin offering (ICO) of the BNB token five years ago, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. If the security watchdog finds that the BNB sale in 2017 was an unregistered security offering, Binance could be put in a similar position as Ripple Labs which has been in an ongoing lawsuit with the SEC over the sale of the XRP token since December 2020. The SEC claims that XRP is a security. However, an SEC enforcement probe involving BNB is likely months away from any conclusion,

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has compared the current state of cryptocurrency to the housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis. Noting that crypto lacks any real value, he said: “it is a house built not on sand, but on nothing at all.” Paul Krugman on Crypto, Housing Bubble, and Subprime Mortgage Crash Nobel laureate Paul Krugman discussed the current state of cryptocurrency in an opinion piece published in the New York Times Monday. Krugman won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2008 “for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity,” the Nobel Prize website details. He began by referencing The Big Short, a book and a movie that tell the story of investors betting on “the proposition that the huge rise in housing prices in the years before the [2008 global financial] crisis was a bubble, and that many of the seemingly sophisticated financial instruments that helped inflate housing would eventually