According to reports, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to pay blockchain analytics firm AnChain.AI $125,000 to help monitor and regulate the decentralized finance industry.
An AnChain.AI company spokesman confirmed the arrangement with the federal regulator to Forbes on Friday, adding the SEC and blockchain startup have the opportunity to sign up to five separate one-year contracts for $125,000 each, for a total of $625,000. According to reports, the first contract began in May.
“The SEC is very interested in learning more about what is going on in the realm of smart contract-based digital assets,” said Victor Fang, CEO and co-founder of AnChain.AI. “We’re giving them technologies to study and track smart contracts,” says the company.
Following SEC chair Gary Gensler’s call for decentralized finance, or DeFi, companies to register with the agency, alleging they are “decentralized in some ways but extremely centralized in others,” the government body and the blockchain startup have reportedly reached an agreement.
According to Gensler, DeFi platform developers and others might join a centralized team that falls under the SEC’s regulatory umbrella.
The SEC recently disclosed that it had filed an enforcement action in the first case involving securities using DeFi technology.
The industry has a market valuation of over $126 billion, according to CoinGecko data. Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange by volume, with over $1 billion in DeFi tokens traded in the last 24 hours; its UNI token is also the most valuable, with a market cap of $14.2 billion.
AnChain.AI is a blockchain analytics company based in California that records crypto transactions across many public and private chains.
According to Forbes, the company has devised methods to make its business more “preventive,” spotting suspect addresses and transactions rather of waiting until a hack or other disaster occurs to investigate.
