Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, slams everything but Bitcoin

Saylor outlined three factors that he believes are weighing on Bitcoin, one of which is the cross-collateralization of altcoins, which he considers unregistered securities.

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor has thrown cryptocurrencies under the bus by urging authorities to do more to combat dangerous crypto sector activities.

Saylor told Sven Henrich, the creator of technical analysis website Northman Trader, that a "parade of horribles" is weighing down on Bitcoin and that authorities must act accordingly.

A "parade of horribles" is driving Bitcoin down.

Saylor explained the "parade of horribles" by naming three elements that have a detrimental influence on Bitcoin's price.

The first issue is the prevalence of wash trading in the cryptocurrency industry. Unlike stocks, there are no particular restrictions addressing digital asset wash trading.

Wash trading is a type of market manipulation that involves purchasing and selling an item at the same time. This method can lead to a distorted view of what is going on in the market, such as artificially high volume.

This leads to the second component, which Saylor described as the impact of unregulated exchanges and the resulting market instability. Further, the MicroStrategy CEO discussed a conflict of interest in exchanges functioning as both market makers and token holders, in connection with wash trading and high-leverage trading.

“If you had 20x leverage trading on Apple stock with no wash trading rules, Apple would be a lot more volatile asset and so would the Nasdaq.”

Finally, Saylor shifted to cryptocurrencies and stated that only Bitcoin is a commodity because there is no issuer. A further 19,000 cryptos are unregistered securities, according to him. With this "cross-collateralized" use of Bitcoin, a trillion-dollar "cloud" trading scheme has been created.

“What you have is a $400 billion cloud of opaque, unregistered securities trading without full and fair disclosure, and they are all cross-collateralized with Bitcoin.”

On the horizon is a schism in the regulatory approach of cryptocurrency.

On May 18, SEC Chair Gary Gensler told the House Appropriations Committee that Bitcoin is a commodity "maybe."

Crypto-assets are currently supervised by the SEC and treated under relevant securities laws in the United States.

On May 16, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chairman Rostin Behnam told CNBC that it makes sense to go through all the cryptocurrencies, defining each as a commodity or security and appointing the proper agency power appropriately.

“Within this space, in my view, it makes sense for commodities to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and securities to be regulated by the SEC.”

Bitcoin and Ether, according to Behnam, fulfill the criteria of a commodity. However, there are "plenty" of additional tokens that fit under that category.

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