Cardano Sparks Controversy by Courting Regulation

“Hopefully we’ve made clear by now that the market can’t go straight up all the time without any corrections. This is a healthy mid-bull cycle correction, one that will help Bitcoin prepare for a longer, more sustained run-up in the near future.”

Yet another week in crypto is behind us, and lately, the Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) chatter was all about regulatory pressure and exchanges, as well as projects crumbling beneath it.

Not all regulation is bad, of course. But excessive regulation — that stifles innovation by making it more difficult for new players to enter the market and even worse — is.

By demanding full compliance to rigid, outdated traditional legislative framework, excessive regulation is pushing crypto closer to the traditional financial system that we currently see crumbling all around us.

The endgame here is not only supervision, but also total control and conversion of free and decentralized networks into something akin to CBDCs and corpocoins – centralized, manipulated, politicized and censorship-prone.

This type of regulation has hurt the U.S. in more ways than one. With crypto becoming more of a global phenomenon, any action that targets crypto will force users to either go underground or do business elsewhere ... and leave the U.S. behind as the new financial system develops without it.

So, when we saw that Cardano (ADA, Tech/Adoption Grade “B-”), a project we take a great interest in, decided to implement anti money laundering analytics, we had to voice our concerns:

Not everyone liked our criticism, and an interesting discussion formed within the thread.

As one reader put it:

Indeed, among all the dissent, we got some great comments from the community, as well as a direct response from Charles Hoskinson himself:

We also received an invitation to a debate from a Cardano Foundation representative:

We ended up extending both Charles and Jeremy an invitation to a call where we could ask all the questions we have about this controversial topic. We’re eager to discus, and how (and if) it would reflect on the present and future of Cardano – and other cryptocurrencies in general.

We will keep you posted, and there might even be a video or two in store, so do watch out for those!

To make things clear: We still love what the developers and the community are building. We love the project.

However, a big part of our objective and analytic approach is looking at the big picture. It’s from that perspective that we’ve voiced our concern.

Although many fans of the project believe that crypto needs to be regulated in order to achieve widespread adoption, the question remains: How far is too far in order to be compliant? Does full compliance mean walking over ideals which gave birth to the idea of cryptocurrencies in the first place?

We hope not. Instead, we invite you to read this column weekly, as the situation develops. Hopefully, we’ll have answers that will not only satiate our curiosity, but benefit the crypto community in general, in the near future.

Until then, stay safe and trade well.

Jurica Dujmović