building some of the most respectable decentralized finance protocols. Deridex, Opyn and ZeroEx were all accused of illegally offering financial products to U.S. persons without the proper registration.
If Opyn had had those certifications, and added a standard know your customer setup to meet the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act would things be different? Or, is there something fundamental about the way DeFi operates that will always cut against U.S. law? That’s at least because DeFi itself can’t be ring fenced, only the gangways and apps used to access it’s protocols. By nature blockchain-based tools are global and incapable of discriminating against any potential use – as long as you can pay the gas fees, you can transact .
Pham’s comments aren’t far off from what CFTC Commissioner Summer Mersinger said in her dissenting opinion to the crackdown on Deridex, Opyn and ZeroEx. Apart from the usual line about the CFTC regulating through enforcement, Mersinger also raised the point that the CFTC failed to demonstrate what the protocol’s actually did wrong.