Swiss Regulator Urges Financial Watchdogs to Protect Crypto Investors

Crypto trading is increasingly similar to the U.S. stock market of the late 1920s, the head of the Swiss financial watchdog has remarked. The high-ranking official believes that regulatory agencies around the world should do more to ensure investor protection.

Governments are still trying to find the best approach to overseeing the $900-billion crypto asset market, which in many jurisdictions is only partially regulated, Euronews noted in a report on Wednesday. Officials have issued numerous warnings about the risks associated with cryptocurrency investments, including “manipulation of opaque crypto markets.”

Much more can be done in that regard, according to a statement by Urban Angehrn, CEO of Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma). Speaking during a conference in the Swiss city of Zurich, Angehrn further commented:

It would seem to me that a lot of trading in digital assets looks like the U.S. stock market in 1928, where all kinds of abuse, pump and dump, are now in fact frequently common.

The top Finma executive also urged his colleagues to “think about the potential of technology to make it easy to deal with the large amounts of data and to protect consumers from trading on abusive markets.” His call comes amid market turmoil and problems with some crypto projects in the past several weeks.

The overall capitalization of the crypto market fell to $900 billion, from around $3 trillion in November, 2021. Bitcoin (BTC), the cryptocurrency with the largest market cap, dropped below $20,000 per coin earlier this month, for the first time since December 2020.

This year’s losses in its value reached approximately 60%, but high inflation and rising interest rates have prompted a flight of capital from other higher-risk assets and stocks as well, the report points out. On this backdrop, and given the troubles at companies like Celsius, regulatory pressure on the industry is likely to increase.

Lubomir Tassev is a journalist from tech-savvy Eastern Europe who likes Hitchens’s quote: “Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do.” Besides crypto, blockchain and fintech, international politics and economics are two other sources of inspiration.

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