Chris Giancarlo

And it's in society's interest that they trade on that information.

Why?

Because that person hedges his or her risk.

But more importantly, they bring that information to the market.

So in commodity markets, we don't have the same concept.

We actually want people to trade on their knowledge.

And by trading on it, they're expressing a view into the marketplace.

So you get the true price discovery.

So this notion of insider trading, our law has recognized only limited areas when it applies.

That doesn't mean that in some of these other areas, people might not have a duty.

So whoever knew that we were going to get Maduro overnight and traded on it, that person may have been an employee of the Department of Defense who had an obligation not to trade on it.

And there are sanctions for that even under CFTC laws as well as the Department of Defense.

So the point I'm making, though, Anthony, is we can work through these issues in a mature, sensible way, but we shouldn't simply say, well, because there's possibility, let's get rid of this whole new innovation.

Yeah.

You know, when so back in 2017, when I became chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, we were approached by a number of the big exchanges, CME, CBOE, Cantor Exchange, about their launching a Bitcoin futures market.

And it became very controversial as to whether we at the CFTC were going to allow this marketplace to go forward.

There were full page ads in the Wall Street Journal taken out saying, don't green light this new product because if you do, it's going to be too dangerous.

It's going to destabilize the financial system.

There were calls from European regulators saying, Giancarlo, if you do this, you're going to let Pandora out of the box.

You're going to bring down the system.