Dragonfly, Wintermute and others talk about the Movement incident in detail: The market maker problem is hurting the entire industry. How to improve it?

Compiled by: TechFlow

Guest:

Evgeny Gaevoy, Founder and CEO of Wintermute

host:

Haseeb Qureshi, Dragonfly Managing Partner

Robert Leshner, CEO of Superstate and Lianchuang

Tom Schmidt, Partner of Dragonfly

Summary of key points

· $38 million token sell-off exposed: Movement Labs' deal with Web3 Port reveals the dark side of crypto market making.

· Market makers or withdraw from liquidity? — — An in-depth analysis of an incentive mechanism that allows market makers to sell tokens and share profits with the foundation.

· Venture Capital Turns a blind eye – Why top investors still support Movement Labs in the face of obvious risks, what does this mean for cryptocurrency due diligence.

· Rushi was fired — The CEO of Movement Labs was fired after weeks of denial, but are the rest of the team involved?

· Wintermute’s Evgeny speaks out — As one of the largest market makers in the crypto space, Evgeny has expressed his opinions on dark transactions, selling mechanisms and failures in transparency.

· Airdrop, market operations and losses of ordinary investors - We analyze how token issuance is manipulated behind the scenes and who really bears the losses.

· The importance of disclosure – Haseeb believes that cryptocurrency markets need to force public market making agreements to prevent regulators from intervening.

· Self-regulation or SEC intervention? ——Can the industry improve itself, or is we triggering another wave of securities law enforcement?

· The Crisis of Trust in Cryptocurrencies – The lack of transparency could lead to the collapse of the entire token model. This issue discusses how to solve this problem.

Wonderful view summary

· We hope that ordinary investors will not lose money as much as possible.

· I think it is ultimately very beneficial for market makers to disclose information. I think this will help normalize the market because it is all about creating norms.

· Many times people just want to find someone to blame, rather than gaining insight into the market structure and the mechanisms of liquidity operation.

· For market makers, this incentive must be strong enough to drive prices up and can also be cashed out later.

Sometimes , if you don’t have a deep crypto circle or lack recommendations, it’s hard to tell who has good reputation and who is not.

· We have competitors in DeFi, centralized exchanges, venture capital, decentralized market market making, etc., but there may be only a very small number of market makers that can cover all areas.

· In my opinion, the ideal disclosure system is that the information gap between the exchange and the average investor is basically zero. When you apply for an exchange to list, the information that the public knows should be consistent with the information that the exchange knows.

· We can choose to disclose this information, be responsible to investors, or we can remain silent because we do not want to be criticized. This is exactly the current situation of our industry: there is no disclosure, but if you disclose it, you will be attacked instead.

· There are three channels that can effectively standardize disclosure. The first channel is through the exchange. The second channel is through venture capital companies. The third channel is through the market vendor itself.

· If we take the initiative to create a disclosure system that suits us, it will be more beneficial to the industry.

· As an industry, we need to mature and solve these problems in advance to avoid truly losing the trust of ordinary investors. Such events will ultimately weaken the confidence of the entire token industry.

· Any consensus reached by the industry may be supplemented, added or formalized on this basis by regulators.

· Those claims that the project parties claimed “we didn’t know it worked” were unreliable in most cases. In this case, they know.

Movement Labs Scandal: The Strange Story of Market Makers

Haseeb: There has been a lot of interesting news lately, one about Movement reported by CoinDesk. A company associated with Movement Labs signed an agreement with a team called Web3 Port. The content of this agreement is that if the full dilution of Movement is valued at more than $5 billion, Web3 Port can liquidate the tokens they hold and share all the profits of selling tokens equally with the Foundation.

In other words, this market maker plays the role of "agent" in token selling, and their incentive mechanism is to drive the price of tokens to rise. This not only allows market makers to make money, but the Movement Foundation can also make money, which obviously has caused great doubts. They also received 5% of the total supply of tokens, a huge amount relative to circulation, with current total circulation of less than 10%.

They sold $38 million worth of MOVE tokens, and Binance banned the account. At first everyone involved denied it all, and Coindex eventually reported the matter and provided the relevant contract, which led to the sacking of Rushi, co-founder and CEO of Movement Labs. Now, the incident seems to have finally come to an end. Movement is forming a new team and now a new organization called Movement Industries is being established. Everything was messy, but Movement kept falling.

The industry began to reflect on why this happened, especially because it was supported by a lot of big venture capital and all marketing was successful.

Evgeny, I don 't know if you have a direct relationship with Movement, can you explain it to us? How common is this situation in market-making agreements? What's special about this compared to a normal market making agreement? Help us understand what is going on.

Robert: Before that, I would like to disclose that Robot Ventures is a very small investor in Movement, and we know nothing about any contract or market making and we are not involved.

Evgeny: This agreement is very inconsistent with market standards.

Usually, a standard market maker agreement will include some key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the uptime of market making, how much money is needed, etc. These are the responsibilities of liquidity providers and market makers. Accordingly, they will get some motivation. Market makers usually get some benefits from it, and at the end of the agreement, they can substitute stablecoins or US dollars to the token loan and return it to the agreement at a certain exercise price, which is usually 25%, 50% or more of the current price. This is a typical way of working.

This contract is very inconsistent with market standards because it has no options and no similar mechanism. Basically, it has a very strange incentive mechanism to drive the token price to rise, because once it exceeds 5 billion, the protocol and market makers share the gains equally.

The real operation of market making in crypto market

Haseeb: So what is the role of market makers and how do they participate in the token listing process?

Haseeb: Usually, if you have a token, you can publish it on a decentralized exchange (DEX), or through other similar platforms, so you are actually providing liquidity. But when you want to list on an exchange like Coinbase or Binance, you can’t just publish the token and then count on someone to trade it.

These exchanges need to ensure liquidity of transactions. This means that there must be people who are willing to buy and sell. Usually, such roles are taken on by market makers. Therefore, token issuers often enter into agreements with market makers like Wintermute. These agreements require market makers to provide a certain level of liquidity, such as maintaining a spread.

In exchange, market makers are paid because they need to take risks and invest money. Usually, the project party will lend tokens to market makers so that they can perform market making operations, and the market makers will also receive corresponding rewards. Sometimes this reward is cash, sometimes an option structure, so that if the token performs well, the market maker can retain some of the tokens at a predetermined price, which is usually higher than the price when the token was first listed.

Why isn’t every market maker incentivized to increase the price of tokens? You have an option structure and an exercise price. Why isn’t your motivation to raise all the prices?

Evgeny: It can be said that anyone has such motivation. I understand why people think that market makers have motivation to increase the price of protocol tokens, and the key is actually how big this incentive is. In our case, we might get about 0.5% of the token supply, but usually lower. Now this ratio has dropped significantly, in fact, depending on the market value of the agreement.

But even if you as a market maker and have such an option structure, you still need to keep the price high before the contract expires, because in these contracts, at least in the contracts we participate in, if you as a market maker does not display the buying and selling quotes according to the procedure, the token issuer can cancel the entire contract, so you have no options to speak of, and you have to try to sell the tokens in your hand, which may cause the price to fall. Therefore, this incentive must be strong enough to drive price increases and can also be cashed out later.

In the Web3 Port case, there is a very obvious incentive, which is to sell when the market value exceeds $5 billion, but there is another sign that it has brought great incentives to market makers. A huge amount of money like 60 million or 100 million is absolutely not going to happen in our case because it is a huge amount. Even if the agreement gives you 5% of the token supply, as a market maker, profit from trading, this $60 million in capital will incur real costs if you invest in a perpetual contract strategy or market market maker strategy. If you return the protocol token and offer huge collateral like $60 million, you have the additional incentive to drive the price up, selling as many MOVE tokens as possible in order to get those dollars back. Otherwise, you are losing money every day because you have to bear the cost of these funds.

Have you been manipulated from the beginning?

Haseeb: What we are now discussing is a very suspicious market maker agreement, which is not a normal market maker agreement structure. How common is this situation? How many market makers adopt this operation method? How many projects will be linked to these types of protocols?

Robert: For example, a new market maker you 've never heard of suddenly appears? Is it easy to create a market maker, close it, and then repackage the brand? What is the story here?

Evgeny: It is possible. However, there are many market makers in Asia operating, but they do not publicly advertise themselves, so it is difficult for us to notice. I know Kelsey Ventures, but before this scandal broke out, almost no one knew about their existence. But what interested me is that I thought I had learned about all the important market makers, but these new faces continued to emerge and participated in some operations.

I think such protocols are very rare in formal projects. But if we look at tokens that are only listed on second-tier or third-tier exchanges and have never entered mainstream exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, I believe there may be a lot of similar things in those places.

Haseeb: Robert, what is your first reaction when these things are exposed?

Robert: My first reaction is that this kind of thing actually happens often, but the public doesn’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes. There may be more drama every day, just not reaching exposure levels like CoinDesk. When I read this information, I felt like a farce. I wonder how many similar farces are going on in the current market environment. Some market makers may be doing crazy things, while the project team lacks negotiation experience, resulting in unreasonable terms and incentive mechanisms in the agreement. This is a real disaster. However, I think the public now has a better understanding of how market makers operate, and hope to see more transparent reports on the actual situation in the future, because the current transparency is too low.

Evgeny: But I would like to add that it is difficult for market makers to do these operations without a protocol. So the statement that those parties to the agreement claim "we don't know how it works" is not credible in most cases. In this case, they know.

Tom: The case of Movement is strange, it is not a top-notch project, but it is not a small project with no background at all. The project still has some highlights, and someone should support it behind the scenes and pointed out: "This is not right, this does not meet the standards." But the team may have caused these problems due to lack of experience.

This reminds me of the venture capital era before YC Safe. At that time, each venture capital had its own convertible clause, and very demanding clauses were included in negotiations, such as extreme liquidation priorities. The emergence of YC Safe has brought transparency and standardization to the entire industry. Now, everyone can choose a public standard contract. Market making is still in a state similar to the era without Safe. If you understand the rules, you may win a good deal for yourself, but there is no industry standard.

Haseeb: That's true. Although there are some services, such as Coinwatch, that can help project parties navigate through market making negotiations, because market makers are repeatedly involved, and project teams usually only experience one token issuance. Working with market makers for the first time and having tokens listed on large exchanges is one of the most important decisions about liquidity. Therefore, there are good market makers and bad market makers.

Sometimes, if you don’t have a deep crypto circle or lack recommendations, it’s hard to tell who has good reputation and who is not.

Evgeny: We have competitors in DeFi, centralized exchanges, venture capital, decentralized market market making, etc., but perhaps only a very small number of market makers can cover all areas.

Movement Labs and its industry impact

Haseeb: In addition to the operation of the market making mechanism itself, the most eye-catching thing is everyone’s attention to the team and what prompted the founder to make such a decision. The Movement team has been praised for its youth, vitality and ambitiousness. Why did they choose this method? What made the founders decide not to follow the path of fair competition, but instead choose to sell tokens and try to cash out in advance, rather than focus on delivering actual products?

They have been widely criticized for launching tokens without actual products. Therefore, there are many rumors that they rely on contractors, have insufficient technical teams, and pay more attention to marketing rather than substantive content. Most of them are actually rumors and no one can provide conclusive evidence to prove their specific behavior. But people are saying that they manipulate traffic, do not do airdrops, and there is no real product before launching the token. These all point to possible misconduct in the project.

After discussing Movement's post-event analysis with several industry insiders, I had some questions. First, has this thing changed your perspective on startups or founders? What is the incentive mechanism for founders in the industry? Are there really countless founders like Rushi? People are discussing these things, but there is actually no conclusive evidence. I haven't seen many other projects like Movement. What do you think of these issues?

Tom: I think this is really rare, which is why it attracts so much attention. But I was reading a Coin Telegraph article recently, in which I mentioned market maker agreements, I felt that people might underestimate the number of lesser-known but not high-quality projects in the long tail, and there are indeed many such projects. As you said, those people will look for these second-tier and third-tier exchanges and market makers. But it's really crazy to launch a high-profile project like this with a market value of $3 billion and going through something like this.

Haseeb: Evgeny, what do you think about this issue? What will you pay attention to when the next token contacts you? What should we pay attention to?

Evgeny: For me, I’m very sensitive to founders who are very overbearing and very marketing-oriented. But I know that in Silicon Valley, traditional venture capital often likes these founders because they bring vitality, and I know they are very strong, and this situation often coincides with scamming others. After that, I will be more selective and cautious in these things.

Haseeb: I want to hear what Robert thinks, but we don’t actually invest in this project, not because we think they will sell tokens to retail investors or break the lock-up agreement. I don't think any founder will be considered someone who will break the lock and sell the tokens.

The reason we didn't invest is that we don't think their technology is interesting. We think this is just a spin-off project. When I first met Rushi, I only met him once or twice, and I was impressed by him as a very energetic, very charming, very ambitious young man. Now, this has become a kind of meme, and Blockworks once had a promotional article about Movement that repeatedly stressed that they were young and raised a lot of money. It seems that just because you are young and raising funds means you are a good founder.

Haseeb: How do you view investment in Rushi?

Robert: In the A-Series financing stage, this investment is relatively low in the founder, but in the early stages of our investment, such as the seed round, it is indeed completely dependent on the founder. We don't pay much attention to issues such as scalability of technology, but rather the eyes of the founders, their ambitions and why they have such ambitions. Do I think they can succeed?

As the stage progresses, this dependence will gradually decrease, focusing more on the actual progress of the project, including technological progress and investor financing progress. By the time of round C or D, the founders have little effect because they have proved themselves and are more focused on the actual performance of the project. Therefore, this is a gradual process, and when we invest in this project, we are in this gradual stage.

Why cryptocurrencies need market makers to disclose

Haseeb: In traditional markets, you need to disclose who your market maker is, and in cryptocurrencies, the exchange knows who your market maker is. Both Binance and Coinbase know. You must provide this information before you apply for listing. But ordinary investors and the public don't know it. In my opinion, the ideal disclosure system is that the information gap between the exchange and the average investor is basically zero. That is to say, when you apply for an exchange to list, the information that the public knows should be consistent with the information that the exchange knows. I think we should develop in this direction in the future, but we are still far from this goal at the moment. I even think that the terms of the market making agreement should be disclosed. This is also what Hester Pierce mentioned in her speech, where she described the cryptocurrency disclosure system in detail and suggested that the terms of the market-making agreement should be disclosed to the public.

What do you think of this system? Will you strongly object, think it is absolutely impossible, or think it will be a good thing? What do you think of this issue?

Evgeny: I support this idea very much because I think we have to admit that although we pretend to be not stocks, they behave very similarly to stocks. For example, in an IPO (initial public offering), stocks need to disclose a lot of information about market makers, investors and various risks. Hester's speech is about this topic. But what we have to discuss is not just the issue of information equivalence between exchanges and retail investors, but the platform investors should have as much information as possible in order to make a purchase decision. In fact, we didn't do that.

I think the basic contents of market making agreements, such as loan size and exercise price, are crucial. As an ordinary investor, you need to know the motivations of market makers, such as their incentive to sell above a certain price. Once the price exceeds this level, there may be more selling pressure, or they may continue to hold, but at least you are fully informed.

In fact, we once had a project disclosed by the agreement, which was World Coin six months ago. I remember World Coin did disclose loans, market makers and exercise prices, but they were met with a lot of criticism. People are starting to question why such a structure is created, as if every token does not have a similar situation. They have received a lot of criticism for this, and I don't think they enjoy the experience. More importantly, all founders became more cautious after that.

We can choose to disclose this information, be responsible to investors, or we can remain silent because we don’t want to be criticized. This is exactly the current situation of our industry: there is no disclosure, but if you disclose it, you will be attacked instead.

Robert: So if the disclosure is voluntary, it actually forms a state of balance in which no one discloses it. Under a mandatory disclosure system, everyone must disclose, just like the operation of registered securities we discuss.

Do you think we must have such a requirement to achieve the transformation? Or do you think some self-regulatory step can be used to prompt issuers to disclose market maker information?

Evgeny: I have considered this issue. Usually we can organize a meeting like some companies, reach an agreement and decide to disclose information. I think it will be very beneficial for those market makers to disclose information in the end. I think this will help normalize the market because it is all about creating norms. Once these norms are established, other market makers are forced to follow them or choose not to participate. So it is really difficult without the mandatory requirements of the SEC.

Haseeb: I think there are three channels that can effectively implement this standardization. The first channel is through the exchange. This is the easiest thing to do if Coinbase or Binance decides that you have to disclose if you want to go public. This means everyone has to disclose because they want to go public on Coinbase or Binance. In this case, you must disclose it before applying for listing. Therefore, everyone will disclose because they want to go public on these platforms.

The second channel is through venture capital companies. Because there are a small number of highly prestigious venture capital firms, they can agree to implement a standard disclosure system that requires their portfolio companies to make these disclosures. It's like an additional protocol.

The third channel is through the market vendor itself. Those high-profile marketers who are not afraid to disclose their market maker agreements can decide that we jointly agree that if you work with a market maker that does not disclose it, it is suspicious.

Now, the problem with market makers agreeing to do this is that if there is no mandatory disclosure of all market makers, you may have only one or two market makers who don’t do bad things, and there are projects like Web3 Port. For example, Rushi may not have only one market maker, they may have multiple, and one of them is a seller.

I think some unity is needed to address this and make sure all market makers are disclosed and exchanges know it. Because the exchange can see who is trading assets and who is providing liquidity. Therefore, you cannot operate in front of an exchange, and the exchange does not know. So if you are Binance or Coinbase, you are the primary liquidity provider of an asset and ultimately you are the primary executor.

The last option is to wait for the SEC to do this. But I think the SEC will take too long and the ultimate disclosure system will not be the form we want. This will be more beneficial to the industry if we take the initiative to create a disclosure system that suits us. If you try to sync it with traditional securities, you will have two problems. One is that you will get a lot of useless disclosures that no one cares about, are purely formal or some unimportant disclosures. The second is that you cannot balance the relationship between the cost of disclosure and the value of disclosure well.

Finally, I think there is a view that whether disclosure means you basically agree that the token is a security. I think it's worth exploring the idea in advance that disclosure is good for anything. It is always good to make a disclosure, and that doesn't mean you are a securities or not. Many things that are not securities will also disclose relevant information.

So, at the end of the day, more disclosure is good. We can say that it has nothing to do with securities, it 's just the way you want to go public on an exchange. If you want to list on the exchange, you must make these disclosures. This has nothing to do with the Securities Law, and does not mean that this thing is an unregistered securities.

When a token is ready to go public, there will always be a major counterparty involved in the negotiations, possibly a foundation or other person holding a large number of tokens. Even if they have no direct relationship with the project, there is usually a person on the other side of the exchange, probably just as a "representative". Even if the agreement is completely decentralized, this person may be the one who is pushing for the token listing. Whether this person is the so-called "issuer" or not, they need to be responsible for providing some necessary information disclosure to help the token go public and gain liquidity.

I think that as an industry, we need to mature and solve these problems in advance so as not to truly lose the trust of ordinary investors. Such events will ultimately weaken the confidence of the entire token industry.

Evgeny: Not only does the market making agreement need to be disclosed, there are many other important things, such as major transactions. Any substantial transaction is involved, disclosure is required.

Robert: It involves whether people are willing to buy and sell certain assets. We finally reached a node in this industry and some information began to be disclosed to everyone. For example, the token unlocking timetable did not exist a few years ago. Everyone is discussing this timetable, but there is also the cost basis for investors, such as their investment sources.

Haseeb: But there is still a lot of work to be done here to build the right disclosure structure. I think the trust issue of the entire market, especially all tokens, is likely to gradually worsen. Therefore, I strongly encourage anyone who thinks about this issue seriously to act as soon as possible, rather than pursue perfection.

Because you can always improve and improve. Moreover, any consensus reached by the industry may be supplemented, added or formalized on this basis by regulators. As an industry, the best way to do it is to take the lead and demonstrate good trust, not only for the regulatory authorities, but more importantly for your own industry, and to enhance the confidence of investors.

Do market makers control the price of tokens?

Haseeb: There has been a lot of discussions about market makers recently, especially the incident of Movement Labs. As a venture capitalist, I feel a little relieved because in the past, people always regard venture capitalists as "bad people", but now people seem to be more inclined to think that market makers are "bad people".

May I ask, can market makers really control the price of tokens? How can we believe that you have not manipulated the price of tokens? How big is the impact of market makers on the market? What do you think of those who say “Wintermute will fall as soon as it participates in market making”?

Evgeny: Now market makers have become the new "bad guy". This is actually a periodic phenomenon. In a bull market, people think market makers are pushing up prices; in a bear market, people think market makers are pushing down prices. Actually, we were considered “bad guys” two months ago, but things have changed now. I think people are always looking for new targets of blame.

Haseeb: The role of market makers in different market cycles varies greatly.

Evgeny: Many times people just want to find someone to blame, rather than gaining insight into the market structure and the mechanisms of liquidity operation. In fact, a lot of discussions about market makers are based on misunderstandings. For example, some people think that we sell off after getting tokens from Binance to lower the price, allowing Binance to profit from liquidation. This logic is wrong because both we and Binance make profits from ordinary investors.

Haseeb: So you don’t want ordinary investors to lose money?

Evgeny: Of course, we hope that ordinary investors will not lose money as much as possible. In the past few months, the liquidation of ordinary investors has been serious, causing many people to exit the market. January was a good month for us, but it wasn't very good for February, March and April.

Haseeb: When the activity of ordinary investors decreases, the attractiveness of market making will also decrease. How is your current liquidity?

Evgeny: This is not linear. If the trading volume drops by 50%, our earnings will not decrease by 50%, but will decrease more.

Haseeb: This is related to the volatility of the crypto market. Do you think the price volatility and momentum effects of the crypto market make market making more complicated?

Evgeny: Actually, it doesn't. Our model operates on multiple trading platforms, and we buy and sell between different platforms. The problem is that if a large liquidity fund suddenly enters and starts buying a certain token, it can quickly push up the price, which is difficult for us to deal with.

Haseeb: In this case, what are your losses?

Evgeny: We have about 50% of our contracts that will lose.

Robert: But can your profitable contracts make up for losses?

Evgeny: Yes, we have a relatively diversified business, for example, we are also engaged in over-the-counter trading (OTC), which helps us gain more profits in liquidity provision.

Haseeb: So, does this also exist in traditional finance regarding the option structure? Or is this a phenomenon unique to the crypto market?

Evgeny: In traditional finance, there is indeed a similar structure, but it is not exactly the same. In the crypto market, market makers often play the role of investment banks.

Haseeb: Why does the crypto market develop in this way? Do you think this is related to the token 's cash flow and volatility?

Evgeny: It makes sense. The evolution of the market may be because the tokens are too volatile, which makes market makers more inclined to obtain profits through option structures. As the market develops, token pricing becomes more efficient and volatility decreases, and it may be more like market making in traditional markets in the future.

Haseeb: If the market structure changes, how will the role of market makers be adjusted?

Evgeny: If new models emerge, such as Binance proposes a new market mechanism, market makers may provide liquidity in different ways. In short, changes in market structure will affect how market makers operate.

Crypto Market Structure Act: What are the stakes

Haseeb: A new market infrastructure bill was recently introduced. This bill is a comprehensive rewrite of the previous FIT21 bill. Although there are many similarities in spirit to previous bills, there are also some significant differences.

The bill has a very clear definition of digital assets and tokens, which clarify what circumstances are tokens considered as securities or non-securities. The CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) will be responsible for the spot market of non-securities tokens in the crypto space, while the SEC (SEC) reserves the right to enforce capital raising and fraud. In addition, projects can raise up to $150 million in tokens each year, provided they plan to decentralize. Unlike the previous "code decentralized testing", a so-called "maturity testing" has been introduced, that is, the standard of mature blockchain protocols is decentralization and/or autonomy, requiring no one to control more than 20% of the voting rights, and its value mainly comes from the procedural functions of the blockchain system. This definition is a bit vague, and I don't fully understand its boundaries. It may be intentionally designed to be blurred, but it is not clear about the situation where a team or group controls the system. There are many questions about multi-signature, security committees and escalability in the crypto market, and it is unclear how to intersect with the so-called immature blockchain protocol. The bill also postponed the regulation of DeFi (decentralized finance), which currently has a relatively narrow definition.

I want to first hear what everyone thinks about this bill.

Robert: I didn't spend much time on this because all the bills will evolve and the first draft is definitely not the final version. If you look at the current stablecoin legislation, you can clearly see this. I think this bill will change a lot, the definition will change, and some core structures will change. There is still a long way to go before the signing of the law. If this bill is signed as is law, I think it will be a good thing for everyone. Whether you are a founder, venture capitalist, market maker or ordinary investor, you will feel that this is a huge upgrade and improvement before the legislation of the market structure.

As an amateur, I think the chances of this bill passing are about 40% to 50%. This is an estimate of a cycle. Because we have about a year and a half left to the next election, this will reset the rules of the game. Therefore, if you want to pass, it may happen in the short term.

Progress in stablecoin legislation will provide important inspiration for the chances of market structure passing. If stablecoin legislation comes to an end, the Senate finds the version they like, and the House generally accepts it, then this will be good for the market structure. If the House says they don't like the Senate version and need to be revised, then that would be detrimental to any crypto legislation. So, if you want to know the results of the market structure, start with a stablecoin.

Haseeb: We have seen Democrats start to have considerable opposition to the bill, mainly because of the deals made by the Trump family. This situation seems to indicate that it is difficult for us to reach meaningful compromises in legislation. Evgeny, how much time have you invested in this bill? What do you think this has to do with your industry?

Evgeny: I haven't read the bill in detail, but we'll definitely give feedback on it.因为我们在加密领域有很深的联系。我注意到CFTC（美国商品期货交易委员会）的权力似乎比SEC（美国证券交易委员会）更大，我还在思考这是否合适。我个人更倾向于现有的SEC 结构，所以我的直觉是，如果要赋予更多权力，应该是给SEC。

要看法律的具体内容。如果法律只是大致列出规则，并说明谁负责执行，那就不太重要了。

Haseeb： 我认为这非常重要。过去四年中，我们学到的一件事是，你可以在法律的边界内做很多事情，而这些事情并不总是清晰的。我们现在也面临这样的情况。

Evgeny： 我觉得如果有一个更明确的法律框架，那会更好。

Haseeb： 是的，虽然这可能会减少一些风险，但现实是，加密市场几乎所有事情都很复杂且混乱，很多操作并不完全符合任何法律的规定。

Tom，你对市场基础设施法案怎么看？

Tom： 我觉得这仍然很早，我没有花太多时间在上面，但这让我想起了编写良好的加密立法是多么困难。它总是过于具体或不够具体，最终导致一种不理想的解决方案。这不仅适用于加密立法，也适用于一般的立法，但加密市场的变化和模糊性使得这一问题更加突出。

我们能在加密崩溃前修复问题吗？

Haseeb： 这意味着，如果我们只通过了稳定币法案，而没有市场结构法案，那么作为一个行业，我们需要自我监管，建立一些规范。这样，未来的政府或新的法规制定者可以看到行业的现状，

Robert： 这个观点有一定道理，但也不完全正确。四十年前，Gensler 领导的SEC 其实可以通过豁免、框架和各种解释来为行业制定规则，但这并没有发生。未来的SEC 或CFTC 也可以做到这一点。他们不需要立法来创建不同证券或资产的交易框架，他们已经有权力去建立这些框架。这并不一定要来自国会的强制干预。因此，即使国会不采取行动，这并不意味着一切都由我们承担。

Haseeb： 我认为这并不完全正确。SEC 明确表示，他们没有来自国会的授权。这是Gensler 最初所说的，也是新SEC 所说的，国会需要采取行动以便给予我们明确性，否则谁来监管呢？

SEC 和CFTC 都表示，国会的立场非常明确。关于法案的争论意味着没有人拥有明确的权威。如果没有明确的权威，SEC 就会说：“我们不应该制定规则。”这就造成了监管的空白。

Robert： 但他们可以通过正式和非正式的规则制定来进行监管。他们已经在发布很多关于不同项目的解释声明。虽然这并不理想，但他们确实在进行一些事情。

Haseeb： 但大多数情况下，这些几乎都是对之前声明的回撤。我们看到的很多内容都是演讲，而不是规则制定。到目前为止，SEC 还没有发布任何正式的规则。

Evgeny：我们最基本的认知，比如比特币不是证券，这并不是国会通过法律确认的，而是SEC 的决定。

Haseeb： 所以你可以说：“我认为这不在我的监管范围内。” 但我认为SEC 不会说：“这些东西不是证券，它们应该如何运作。”你不能同时做这两件事情。如果它们不是证券，那就不在SEC 的监管范围之内。如果你说要把某些代币归类为证券，那你就已经结束了，因为SEC 不再是非证券的监管者。

那么CFTC 会介入吗？他们会说：“好的，我们来制定规则，要求你们披露这个和那个。”我没有看到CFTC 在这方面采取行动。也许他们会，但目前来看，两个机构都在说他们在等国会的行动，并且两者之间的权威差异也在不断变化。如果国会不采取行动，那就意味着国会故意不想立法。这意味着加密行业将会继续处于无监管状态。

那么CFTC 会介入吗？他们会说：“好的，我们来制定规则，要求你们披露这个和那个。”我没有看到CFTC 在这方面采取行动。也许他们会，但目前来看，两个机构都在说他们在等国会的行动，并且两者之间的权威差异也在不断变化。如果国会不采取行动，那就意味着国会故意不想立法。这意味着加密行业将会继续处于无监管状态。

所以我真的认为，作为一个行业，我们有责任解决这个问题，不仅是为了未来可能被引入的监管制度，也是为了我们自身的利益。我们需要减少市场的波动，提升消费者对代币上市的信心。 人们需要知道，上市的代币是否值得信任，不会被一些不可靠的做市商抛售。