Almost a year following the infamous collapses of Terra, FTX, and Celsius in 2022, as well as numerous other incidents that have since beset the industry, executives discuss the function of crypto rating agencies in mitigating risks within the crypto sphere.
Ben Goertzel, CEO of decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) company SingularityNET, argued in 2022 that rating agencies, not regulators, had a greater capacity to restore confidence in cryptocurrencies.
The executive told Cointelegraph in 2024 that he can still try to identify any regulatory initiatives that would inspire him to have more faith in safeguarding crypto applications. He elaborated:
“Nothing that the world’s regulatory agencies have done since 2022 has increased my faith that they are going to be able in practice to do more good than harm for customers or service providers in the crypto space.”
Conversely, “transparent, crowdsourced, and intelligently aggregated rating mechanisms could contribute significantly to the crypto landscape,” the executive continued.
Additionally, Goertzel stated that developments in AI technology would now facilitate the generation of individualized summaries regarding the reputations of diverse entities in cryptocurrency by utilizing raw data and reports from multiple sources.
According to Goertzel, how United States regulators handled the FTX case demonstrated that special laws against crypto fraud are unnecessary because they can be applied to apprehend “crypto fraudsters” just as they would any other individual who facilitates fraud.
Although Goertzel believes that rating agencies could not avert the FTX collapse, the executive contends that they might have been able to “warn customers about the manifold warning signs that were discernible beforehand.”
Co-founder of the cryptocurrency ratings platform Aria, Anastasia Ulianova, concurs that rating agencies’ responsibilities in collapses such as FTX are limited.
Ulianova stated that they cannot forecast collapses, although they can “raise red flags” when the risk of a particular cryptocurrency exceeds what its performance would indicate. She elaborated:
“A very important point to stress is that a rating can only tell you how much risk you are taking. It is not by any means a certain prediction of an upcoming collapse.”
Despite this, the executive maintains that rating agencies have the potential to assist investors in evaluating the risk-to-reward ratio of tokens, which would enable them to ascertain whether the anticipated returns are commensurate with the associated risks, in addition to assessing the legitimacy and risk of projects.
As a rating agency, their organization’s objective is to “legitimize the inclusion of crypto assets in conventional investment portfolios,” the executive continued.