FTX US Holds Back On Token Listing Because Of Regulatory Uncertainty

FTX US holds back on token listings because of the heavy regulatory uncertainty and Brett Harrison even contrasted the strategy with the one of Coinbase’s so let’s read more in our latest crypto news.

FTX US offers fewer coin and token listings than most of its competitors. Coinbase on the other hand pushed an aggressive listing strategy while the former emphasized caution. If you are trading on Huobi, there are about 487 coins and tokens to choose from as per the figures from CoinMarketcap. Binance has about 395 listings and Coinbase expanded the offerings over the past two years to reach 169. FTX US in the meantime, listed just 27 assets whcih is only a small percentage of the parent company’s 322.

However, this is intentional. The CEO Brett Harrison said:

“That is because we’re not sure where regulations are going to end up in terms of what tokens are allowed to be listed or not allowed to be listed—will exchanges receive enforcement action for listing certain tokens that are deemed to be securities later?”

The US SEC has oversight of the securities products and these are investmetns like shares and bonds that a company or government sells in order to raise capital so that people can buy in the hopes that the seller’s efforts will help them make money. To a certain extent, Harrison added that the question about constitutes security whcih doesn’t matter because it takes attention from bigger consideration about what’s worth best for the customer:

“We want to list very, very high-quality project projects with very clear roadmaps and very clear utility.”

The Robinhood Crypto COO Christine Brown also signaled a similar sentiment when talking about whether the trading app will list Shiba Inu:

“I also think that our strategy is a little bit different than a lot of the other players out there who are just racing to list as many assets as possible right now. We think that the short-term gain we might get is not worth the long-term trade off for our users.”

Under the founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, Coinbase pursued a strategy to try and list every asset where it is legal to do so and warned that the offering of a token doesn’t constitute an endorsement of one. In his earnings call as a CEO, he said:

 “We need to accelerate the process by which we review assets and we add them to the site, because we’re quickly going to be in a world here where there’s so many that we’re not going to be able to keep up.”

FTX US holds back on the listings however but they are in favor of more regulatory clarity. President Biden signed the Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets and compels different government agencies to report back to the White House on crypto regulation.