SEC’s commissioner opposed crypto bailouts, especially for those who failed to manage risk. SBF offers assistance to suffering crypto firms.
Hester Peirce, a commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has spoken out against bailing out cryptocurrency companies, contending it’s actually preferable to “let these things play out” in order to develop a more sustainable business.
Peirce, the SEC commissioner who is most in favor of cryptocurrencies, said in an interview with Forbes that despite being painful, the recent crypto crash is sorting the strong companies from the weak.
“When things are a bit harder in the market, you discover who’s actually building something that might last for the long, longer term and what is going to pass away,” she said.
The commissioner made it plain that she opposed bailouts for anyone involved in the cryptocurrency sector, especially those who failed to manage risk and overextended themselves.
“Crypto does not have a bailout mechanism […] I don’t want to come in and say that we’re going to try to figure out a way to bail you out if we don’t have the authority to do it. But even if we did, I would, I would not want to use that authority, we really need to let these things play out.”
The SEC commissioner’s remarks come as the cryptocurrency market is experiencing a wave of bankruptcies, layoffs, and hiring freezes.
Saving the day with crypto whales
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and Alameda Research, has adopted a different strategy and has been assisting suffering crypto firms as a result of the market collapse.
In order to improve BlockFi’s balance sheets and the platform, Bankman-Fried and FTX will deposit $250 million into the company on a revolving credit facility on Tuesday, he announced to his 706,900 Twitter followers.
It happened just a few days after Alameda Research committed to lending Voyager Digital 200 million USDC and a “revolving line of credit” of 15,000 Bitcoins (BTC), valued $446.3 million at the time of writing.
This is something Bankman-Fried and his businesses have done “a lot of times in the past” to “stem contagion” amid a cascade of collapsing crypto enterprises, he said in an interview with NPR on Sunday.
The SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci referred to the FTX CEO as the “new John Pierpont Morgan” in an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday. He was referring to the Wall Street financier who pledged his own funds and persuaded others to do the same to support the banking system during the 1907 Bankers’ Panic.
“He is bailing out cryptocurrency markets the way the original J.P. Morgan did after the crisis of 1907.”
Peirce contends, however, that market players and regulators may learn a lot from the slump by observing how the market behaves under pressure.
“It is helpful for us to see the points of connection. It’s a moment, not only for market participants to learn, but it’s also for regulators to learn so that we can have a better sense of how the market operates.”
The market turmoil has already had a negative impact on the lending platform Celsius Network and the cryptocurrency-focused hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), which is in danger of going bankrupt after incurring hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to liquidations associated with the ongoing decline in the price of ether.
