Since the start of the year, the U.S. has been waging war on crypto. It began on Jan. 3 when a trio of banking agencies issued a joint statement vowing to keep crypto the hell away from the traditional financial system. That opening salvo was soon followed by a spate of Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits and, this week, the government's anti-crypto campaign hit a new level of intensity when the SEC and New York regulators dropped the hammer on a pillar of the industry: stablecoins.
The blow came in the form of an order from the New York Department of Financial Services to Paxos, a little-known but important firm in the crypto world. Paxos has a variety of crypto-related businesses but its bread-and-butter is stablecoins—its own coin called PAX, and those it issues under the name of other companies, including global giant Binance.
