CFTC Commissioner Stays Bullish on Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology

By Kapil Gauhar

Although the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has slowed down the approval of Bakkt, yet the commissioner Christopher Giancarlo remains bullish on cryptocurrencies as well as blockchain technology, calling them “exponential.” Known lovingly in the community as “Crypto Dad” for his professional crypto position, Giancarlo believes that the motivation behind why Bakkt has been slowed down is that we are in a new phase of innovation that has three unique characteristics which make it different from all the other previous phases.

The 3 Characteristics Detailed by Giancarlo

• The first characteristic is that we live in a time of exponential technological change. That is, the sheer speed of development and innovation has expanded exponentially, both in the form of production of new models and products, as well as their subsequent public adoption.
• The second characteristic is the disintermediation of conventional actors or business models, which can challenge the regulators as well as existing regulatory frameworks.
• The third characteristic detailed by CFTC Commissioner is that the pace and nature of the technology-driven innovation need uplifted technological education across leaders in business and government.

Giancarlo is a firm believer of cryptocurrency who believes that it could’ve prevented the financial collapse of 2008 –

“Today I want to take stock of the current state of Blockchain Technology and renew a focus on how it can impact – and improve – our markets. To begin, I want to take you back for a moment to September 2008. That was a perilous time in global financial markets. An enormous US housing bubble had burst triggering a cascading global credit crisis. Concern was rife about imminent investment and commercial bank failure.”

“I was on Wall Street, serving as a senior executive of one of the world’s major trading platforms for credit default swaps (CDS), then the epicentre of systemic risk. Panic was in the air and tension was on our broken floor trying to maintain orderly markets. I remember a call from a U.S. bank regulator asking about CDS trading exposure of several major banks, including Lehman Brothers. In Fact, trading conditions were deteriorating by the hour. It was clear that the regulator had little means, short of telephone calls, to read all the danger signals that the CDS markets were broadcasting.”

“But imagine what a difference it would have made a decade ago on the eve of the financial crisis if regulators had access to the real-time trading ledgers of large Wall Street banks, rather than trying to assemble piecemeal data to recreate complex, individual trading portfolios.”