According to The Block, Rostin Behnam, Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, emphasized the importance of regulating decentralized finance (DeFi) in his speech at the Chicago Futures Industry Association Expo, comparing it to an "unlicensed doctor."
The presentation comes after the agency announced a month ago that it had resolved allegations of registration breaches at DeFi protocols Opyn, ZeroEx and Deridex.
Behnam said waiting for victims to suffer losses and call for help before taking steps to ensure market supervision, cybersecurity and customer protection would undermine the regulator’s mission.
The CFTC’s DeFi enforcement actions have been controversial over the past month, with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong urging the three companies to take their cases to court, arguing that regulators should not take enforcement actions against decentralized protocols. Meanwhile, the CFTC’s Director of Enforcement Ian McGinley called unregulated DeFi exchanges a “clear threat.”
“Unregulated DeFi exchanges pose a clear threat to CFTC-regulated markets and protected customers,” the CFTC’s director of enforcement, Ian McGinley, said at a September conference.