Skeptical that cryptocurrencies are going mainstream? Look no further than CoinDesk’s Consensus conference this week in New York City. It’s a conference about magic internet money, but the $17 million in ticket proceeds from 8,500 attendees (compared with 2,700 last year) is very real. The explosion of enthusiasm no doubt reflects the exuberance around initial coin offerings and token sales, which weren’t really a thing last year.
The industry is evolving so quickly—much faster than the regulators trying to make sense of it—that it would behoove companies to begin policing themselves, Brian Quintenz, a commissioner for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the conference audience.
One way to do that would be forming an industry-led organization designed to help the community come up with its own agreed-upon standards and rules—perhaps like the one the Winklevoss twins recently proposed for cryptocurrency exchanges. That could help root out bad actors and sloppy practices in the marketplace while regulators get their act together.
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