The U.S. crypto crackdown started at the top, but the sector’s fractures were bottom-up.
Some of the digital asset industry’s biggest names, like Coinbase and Binance, found themselves afoul of U.S. federal agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) after the highly publicized implosion of players like Three Arrows Capital, TerraUSD and many more, as well as the exposure (and collapse) of the allegedly criminal and fraudulent operations at Celsius and FTX.
These weren’t just small-time grifters and predatory scammers, they were — and are — some of the most important names in the entire crypto ecosystem. Only they turned out to be, for the most part, alleged grifters and scammers.