U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believes that bitcoin needs to be as highly regulated as SWIFT.
“Look, the risk with anonymous transactions is one that we all know well. We know this from 9/11 and terror activity that took place in the 15 years preceding that where we didn’t have good tracking, we didn’t have the capacity to understand money flows and who was moving money,” Pompeo said during an interview with CNBC.
In other news, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has settled a fine with a Russian firm that was pushing initial coin offerings (ICOs) without revealing that it was getting paid to do so.
The agency announced that the company, ICO Rating, has agreed to pay $268,998 to settle the charges.
“The securities laws require promoters, including both people and entities, to disclose compensation they receive for touting investments so that potential investors are aware they are viewing a paid promotional item,” Melissa Hodgman, associate director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, said in a press release. “This requirement applies regardless of whether the securities being touted are issued using traditional certificates or on the blockchain.”
Blockchain company Securitize announced that it is now an SEC-registered transfer agent.
The company is now the first and only SEC-registered transfer agent with a working blockchain protocol. It has also created the transfer verification tool (TVT), which allows investors to pre-check the transfer of any digital security token powered by the DS protocol.
“Securitize has consistently led the market through our execution and commitment to delivering on the promise of compliant digital securities on the blockchain. Becoming a registered transfer agent is the natural next step for Securitize as we continue to work toward making all securities digital; it opens up opportunities for issuers of registered securities to tap into the digital securities market in an efficient and trusted way, and also allows issuers of Reg A+ and Reg CF digital securities to use a blockchain-based transfer agent if they wish to exempt their digital securities from the mandatory registration requirements of Section 12(g) of the Exchange Act,” said Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize.
And the liquidator in charge of securing and preserving Cryptopia crypto-asset holdings has issued its latest update.
“We now have possession of Cryptopia data that was stored by a third-party data center in the United States, and since the last update have been successful in accessing that data. This is a very pleasing step towards determining customer holdings, as the data contained the only records of Cryptopia’s customer holdings and certain crypto-assets were only stored on these servers,” Grant Thorton said in a statement.
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