“I’m a reasonable person to get along with. “It was a bit of an icy reception,” said Armstrong. “He’s trying to paint the industry with a broad brush, which I think people are smart enough to see through.”Īrmstrong noted that, unlike with Binance, the SEC did not charge any individual executives at Coinbase nor did it accuse the US exchange of mishandling customer funds.Īsked about his relationship with Gensler, Armstrong described how he tried and failed to meet with the SEC chief in person in Washington. “I do think the timing of doing those back to back was…unfortunate, probably even intentional,” Armstrong said. “How could there be an enforcement action if there’s no clear rulebook? That doesn’t make sense and doesn’t pass the smell test,” the Coinbase CEO said.Īrmstrong questioned the timing of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s decision to file a lawsuit against his company just 24 hours after the agency accused Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, of mishandling customer funds. In the interview, Armstrong detailed how Coinbase spent years “begging” regulators for clarity on the rules but was only “met with silence.” The SEC alleges Coinbase made billions of dollars facilitating the sale of crypto assets as an unregistered exchange, robbing investors of key protections along the way. The Securities and Exchange Commission dealt another blow to the crypto industry on Tuesday by suing Coinbase, America’s largest crypto exchange. “Regardless of the outcome of the case, it’s a step towards clarity.” “The whole point of this case from our point of view is to go get regulatory clarity,” Armstrong told CNN on Wednesday. startup that Dixon described as an “Airbnb for GPUs.” The London office will be led by general partner Sriram Krishnan.Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is confident his battle with federal regulators will benefit the crypto industry, no matter how the judge rules.įor years, the crypto space has operated in a regulatory no-man’s land where there is much uncertainty over what is and isn’t allowed - and over which powerful agency in Washington is calling the shots. It also announced a $43 million investment in the U.K.-based Gensyn, a crypto-meets-A.I. with the appropriate regulatory treatment that ensures a high bar of customer protection, but that embraces decentralization,” Quintenz told me in an interview on Thursday.Īs part of the move, a16z plans to base the next iteration of its Crypto Startup School accelerator program in the U.K. “We’re thinking of this as an investment in the U.K. bill is unlikely to go anywhere given the current climate, Quintenz argued the U.K. is considering a regulatory regime that resembles one recently proposed by two Republican-led House committees.
represents a promising crypto hub.īrian Quintenz, the head of policy for a16z crypto, said that the U.K. Although the country is not without its skeptics-the parliament’s Treasury committee advised last month that cryptocurrency trading should be treated as a form of gambling rather than a financial service-a16z believes that the U.K. is taking a more welcoming approach, led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was a vocal advocate for crypto and blockchain as finance minister and worked with a16z to bring the venture firm to London. “What’s going on now with the Biden administration is they’re basically just trying to kill off the technology,” he said. Instead, it is acknowledging the increasing difficulty of doing business here.
On a Friday video call, as the crypto industry was still reeling from the one-two SEC punch against Coinbase and Binance, a16z crypto head Chris Dixon told me that the move does not mean the firm has given up on the U.S.
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