Hey folks. I’m in Washington, D.C., this week for DC Fintech Week. I’m going to highlight some statements or comments that stood out to me, but on a personal note I wanted to say it was great to meet so many of you (and shoutout to those of you who said you read this newsletter – I appreciate each and every one of you!).
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DC Fintech Week is an annual policy conference organized by Georgetown University School of Law’s Chris Brummer. It’s a substantive conversation, but I enjoy going as much for the people I meet at the event as I do for the talks themselves.
I always say I go to events at least partly for the actual discussions and partly to meet fellow attendees. Here’s what the speakers at the event had to say this year.
Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael Hsu opened day one, comparing crypto user interfaces to the iPhone’s development, but warning that this may trick people into thinking crypto services are similar to traditional financial services.
“In layman’s terms, until crypto matures and appropriate guardrails and gates are put in place, it would be wise to limit the scope of activities commingled within a single crypto firm – a limit on the PD [probability of default] – and to limit integration of crypto and TradFi – a limit on the LGD [loss given default],” Hsu said.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam said the regulator’s case against Ooki DAO pretty much had to happen, calling it “egregious and so obvious” during a one-on-one with Brummer.
“It was hardly decentralized,” Behnam said of the DAO. “There were a few individuals who were very much at the center.”
(Side note: This is basically what I guessed the CFTC would say, lol.)
Ooki DAO has since geofenced U.S. users but it’s unclear whether the DAO or its members have found counsel to respond to the CFTC, which it has some time to do, after a judge ruled late Wednesday that LeXpunK Army and the DeFi Education Fund can participate and argue about how the CFTC serves notice to the DAO’s members.
Custodia Bank founder Caitlin Long took aim at the Federal Reserve over BNY Mellon’s announcement that it would offer custody services for crypto.
Custodia would add a filing to its ongoing lawsuit against the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, which has sat on Custodia’s application for master account access for over a year, Long said. The filing came the next day.
Eun Young Choi, the director of the U.S. Department of Justice’s crypto enforcement team, said crypto mixers are a challenge but have not “slowed us down.” This raised my eyebrows because we’ve heard quite a bit about the risks of anonymity in crypto potentially boosting wrongdoers.
There are three possible explanations: 1) the DOJ has a way around mixers; 2) the DOJ is running its own mixer as a honeypot; or 3) Director Choi is just saying this to throw off the folks using mixers.
Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr warned that banks tokenizing things might be a bit concerning, but also provided some insights as to why it might take (some) regulators a while to write policy.
“The range of options available for dealing with emerging technologies and those benefits are solid,” Barr said. “One of them is just risk identification, so we can enunciate to the world that we see a set of risks and that they should be looked at carefully. And that has an actual effect on behavior.”
He went on to add that regulators who write rules too quickly may find that they’ve fallen behind the actual technology or area they’re overseeing.
Rep. Patrick McHenry, the ranking Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee, said the long-anticipated stablecoin bill may happen within the next few months, but there’s still some ongoing disagreements around regulatory oversight and how the assets are to be stored.
“We agree on all the components of what the asset is,” he said. “We’ve come up with a pretty ugly baby. It is a baby, nonetheless.”
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(The New York Times) Airbus and Air France are (finally) facing the families of the 228 victims of Air France flight 447 in court. The flight was a regularly scheduled one from Brazil to France which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean after its static ports iced over in a storm. For more information, here’s the final report from France’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile, its aviation accident investigator.
Well, it took 29 years, but I finally watched the original Jurassic Park, a cautionary tale about understaffing your engineering department and letting people push code directly to prod.
— Stefan Friedli (@stfn42) October 9, 2022
If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at nik@coindesk.com or find me on Twitter @nikhileshde.
You can also join the group conversation on Telegram.
See ya’ll next week!
The man suspected as responsible for a shooting at a motorcycle club meet up that turned deadly in west central Fresno on October 1 has been charged.
Investors are going to get some clues from the twice-a-decade Communist Party congress slated to start on Oct.16, where Xi Jinping, China's top leader, is expected to secure his third five-year term as the president of the country and the chairman of the military.
Boeing has been lobbying for a pass on a looming deadline that could trigger costly cockpit upgrades on the MAX 10 and MAX 7.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) needs to redefine how it sets rules for retail investors now that the agency seems likely to take on oversight of spot crypto trading, said Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero. She intends to propose a new retail investor definition, she said Friday in an interview with CoinDesk.
The Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation is suing the Department of Justice for failing to provide documents related to the DOJ's handling of protests outside Supreme Court justices' homes this summer.
The New Mexico State Land Office announced it made $2.4 billion in revenue for Fiscal Year 2022, mostly from energy development.
Sen. Patrick Leahy's office said Thursday evening that as a precaution he was taken to a Washington-area hospital for tests.
Antisemitism, racism and hate in any form have no place in Canada. Unfortunately, Jewish communities across Canada and around the world continue to be threatened and targeted for who they are. This is an important reminder for all Canadians to combat antisemitism in all of its forms.
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Adding bacon to your burger usually costs a little more, but the National Pork Producers Council says that thanks to the events playing out in an ongoing Supreme Court case (National Pork Producers Council v. Ross) it might end up costing a lot more. Vox has the full story.
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During Thursday’s House select committee hearing investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, footage was shown featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer behind the scenes phoning leaders for outside help at the height of the violent attack.
“We have got to finish the proceedings, or else they will have a complete victory," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said as she fled the House floor.
British Prime Minister Liz Truss fired her finance chief on Friday after less than six weeks on the job.
Texas Sheriff Javier Salazar on Thursday certified that the group of migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., last month by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) were victims of a crime, qualifying them to obtain a visa. Salazar, the Bexar County sheriff, submitted certification documents that will allow the nearly 50 migrants to apply for U…
‘The FBI set me up with a corrupt briefing and then leaked that to smear me,’ Ron Johnson says during debate
President Emmanuel Macron is facing criticism in France for breaking with strategic ambiguity on nuclear weapons, Politico reported on Oct. 13.
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The House Jan. 6 committee took the extraordinary action of subpoenaing former President Donald Trump on Thursday as it issued a stark warning in its final public hearing before the midterm election: The future of the nation’s democracy is at stake. The panel's October hearing, just weeks ahead of the midterm election, focused on Trump’s state of mind on Jan. 6, 2021 as he egged on his supporters with false claims of election fraud, pushed to accompany them to the Capitol while lawmakers were counting the votes, and then stood by for hours as the mob violently breached the building. “We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion,” said Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel's vice chairwoman and one of two Republicans on the nine-member committee.
The move will directly affect about 65 million Americans receiving Social Security benefits.