“Rife with fraud, manipulation, and money laundering.” That’s a fair summary of how regulators, legislators, and other critics regularly describe crypto. Such claims are made so often that industry insiders seldom challenge them, and their reluctance to push back is understandable given high-profile scandals like FTX and TerraLuna. That, however, does not make the claims correct.
Crypto is a complex global ecosystem. It has operated in a legal and regulatory gray zone, but not for any nefarious reason. Its unique approach to ownership and settlement poses a challenge to rules written for a different kind of financial system. A more objective look shows that most of the activity labeled as crypto fraud is just regular fraud that happens to involve crypto. The vast majority of actual crypto activity is, and always has been, fine.
