The acting chief of the U.S. OCC is now no longer a mountainous fan of cryptocurrencies or DeFi. Now not now no longer up to, now no longer yet.
DeFi is Idiot’s Gold, OCC Chief Says
While the worldwide crypto markets proceed to relate a necessary correction from the most modern local highs, the regulators spherical the field don’t seem like preserving reduction from attacking the nascent change.
While giving a speech to The Blockchain Affiliation at the novel time, the novel chief of the U.S. Train of enterprise of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) Michael Hsu said that digital currencies — including the decentralized finance (DeFi) panorama might maybe maybe well per chance additionally be “fool’s gold.”
Hsu illustrious that the rising hobby in the crypto change reminds him of the monetary climate shortly before the unhealthy 2008 U.S. housing crisis.
Hsu said:
“I if reality be told own viewed one fool’s gold speed from up discontinuance in the lead up to the 2008 monetary crisis. It feels devour we might maybe maybe well per chance additionally be on the cusp of one other with cryptocurrencies (crypto) and decentralized finance.”
For the uninitiated, the DeFi change picked up the tempo since the vital “DeFi Summer of 2020” when a resolution of so-called DeFi blue-chips corresponding to Uniswap (UNI), SushiSwap (SUSHI), Synthetix (SNX), Aave (AAVE), and others rose to prominence resulting from their skyrocketing adoption for lending, borrowing, staking, and swapping of cryptocurrencies.
At press time, the total ticket of digital assets locked in a variety of DeFi protocols exceeds $160 billion, based totally on files from DeFi Llama.
DeFi Beneath Regulatory Scrutiny
Hsu went on to criticize the staking returns being supplied by DeFi protocols below the garb of passive profits. He said:
“A huge series of DeFi platforms offer staking, yield farming, or liquidity mining. All of those are marketed as passive investing performs,” he said. “No intelligent purchasing and promoting is most important. How are the returns generated? It’s miles arduous to derive straight answers that don’t rapid devolve into crypto talk.”
Hsu’s feedback come shortly after the U.S. Securities and Alternate Commission acknowledged that it change into investigating the main Ethereum-based mostly decentralized change (DEX) Uniswap in an strive and study extra about how traders utilize the protocol for token swaps, providing liquidity, and farming yield.
