Mike Pompeo Wants To Heavily Regulate Crypto Transactions

Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State in the Trump Administration says that we need to regulate crypto transactions with heavier regulations. The US administration seems that it doesn’t want to give the crypto industry some breathing space and we take a closer look on his stance in the latest cryptocurrency news below.

During the interview with the CNBC’s Squawk Box panel back on Tuesday, Mike Pompeo doubled down that the digital assets transactions have to be heavily enforced and regulated. With cryptocurrencies getting more and more important into the global markets, CNBC’s resident Bitcoin bull Joe Kernen took a chance on Tuesday to bring up cryptocurrencies in the interview with the US Secretary of State. Surprisingly, Mike Pompeo took the bait but asserted that he doesn’t want to create a viral moment or a meme from himself by taking a certain stance on the growing technology. Pompeo even argued that the anonymous transactions that the cryptocurrencies are capable of carrying out, can enable or even pose a security risk and threat to the country and the country’s allies. Back to the point, Mike Pompeo cited the 9/11 attacks which is something that Congressman Brad Sherman also did to bash Libra last month:

 “We know this from 9/11 and terror activity that took place in the 15 years preceding that where we didn’t have good tracking, we didn’t have the capacity to understand money flows and who was moving money.”

In order to mitigate a redux of the 9/11 attacks which were enabled through financial technologies, Pompeo proposed that ‘’electronic financial transactions’’ should be regulated by the same laws that a global platform like SWIFT is regulated under as well. He admitted however that it will be very difficult to do so and stated that the world is much less secure without the proper regulation over a cashless world. In fact, Mike Pompeo argued that the regulatory oversight over fiat finance has ‘’helped keep the entire world secure and to fight terrorism and other nefarious activity.’’

In his statement, Mike Pompeo didn’t really mention certain fintech platforms or even cryptocurrencies but he commented directly to an inquiry from Kernen. His statements on the crypto industry are coming right after other members from the Trump administration commented on digital assets as well. The President of the United States himself claimed that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can facilitate illicit activity and that Libra should also abide by traditional banking laws as we read in the altcoin news previously.