Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Rostin Behnam addressed the need to oversee decentralized finance in a speech on Monday, likening the situation to “unlicensed doctors.”
Behnam’s prepared remarks during the Futures Industry Association Expo in Chicago, comes about a month after the agency said it organized accusations against DeFi protocols Opyn, ZeroEx and Deridex due to registration violations.
“To suggest that … we should wait until victims are suffering and crying out for help to be proactive and ensure that critical market oversight, robust cybersecurity and system safeguards, and customer protections are in place undermines our mission and purpose,” Behnam said. “If you need an analogy, consider whether you would feel comfortable on the road if only a few people were required to have a driver’s license, or whether, given the choice, you would entrust your health care to an untrained or unlicensed doctor. ”
DeFi has come into the spotlight at the derivatives agency in the past month, with some criticizing enforcement actions against the three DeFi protocols. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong insisted the last three months to bring the cases to court, adding that the agency “not create enforcement actions against decentralized (DeFi) protocols.”
CFTC’s focus on DeFi
Meanwhile, the CFTC’s enforcement director, Ian McGinley, has called unregulated DeFi exchanges “an obvious threat.”
“The existence of unregulated DeFi exchanges is a clear threat to the regulated markets and the customers protected by the CFTC, and it is a threat that we have taken very seriously,” said Ian McGinley, director of enforcement at the CFTC, in a statement. speech in September at a conference organized by the Practicing Law Institute.