Mike Selig

We now have a number of forced reporting and forced transparency initiatives through our regulations.

as a result of Dodd-Frank and regulations there under.

But blockchain technology solves a lot of that using technology instead of kind of the brute force of the regulator.

And so I am very excited about that.

I think that blockchain offers a ton of benefits for our traditional markets and for some of these new markets that we're seeing on the frontier, things like prediction markets, things like new crypto asset products and perpetuals.

I expect to see this technology evolve

be used in a very broad way across our markets, whether it's in securities or commodity derivatives or the next new thing in our markets.

So yes, I believe that transparency can be achieved through using on-chain data.

The one issue that I have as a regulator is, I'll give you an example.

If I'm looking to catch a bad actor who's engaging in insider trading or manipulation or fraud, I can get a ton of data on Shane and I likely can pinpoint that person with enough research and analytics to figure out who they are because they probably onboarded through one of the exchanges.

Let's say they're trading in DeFi.

But I need to find a way to be able to catch some of these bad actors.

So, you know, having tools, analytics tools is very helpful.

I think the technology is in its early stages, but I do expect as on-chain technology continues to advance, it will become much easier for regulators to really lean into the technology for us to replace things like trade reporting to data repositories with on-chain transaction data because we can see the transaction occurred

that it's settled to the Ethereum blockchain or to a layer two or wherever else.

And we can figure out with a strong degree of certainty who the traders are and catch bad actors when, for example, they're trading, you know, using insider information or manipulating markets.

So I'm excited about it.

I think we're in the earlier days, but we're getting there pretty fast.

We work with a number of projects on trying to figure out how to substitute some of our existing rules and regulations for technology, how to automate things and really lean into blockchain technology.

And of course, you've got cyber risks that we're thinking about constantly.