Remember when crypto was so heavily and onerously regulated, so unnecessarily scrutinised by the authorities, that the whole market crashed in spectacular fashion as one tightly regulated crypto platform after another collapsed into oblivion?

Yeah, me neither. Because that’s not quite how it went, is it? The last time the crypto market cratered, back in 2021-22, it was not about the industry being so tightly controlled by regulators, but the opposite. It was precisely because of the lack of regulatory oversight in the so-called “crypto space” that the barons of cryptoland believed they were entitled to mess around with other people’s money as if they were playing Monopoly.

It was the huge gaps in the rules around risk-taking, leverage and transparency that were exploited and which ended up leading so many crypto projects to collapse as the market turned against them. And it was the lack of consumer protection — and understanding of risks involved — that led so many retail investors to lose their life savings (most crypto barons were safe, of course, because they knew better than to put all their money in crypto).