Terraform Labs CEO on SEC lawsuit: happy to talk merits and potential problems of crypto
In a new interview with Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman, Terraform Labs Co-Founder Do Kwon discusses the major cryptocurrency project's lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after he and his company were served with SEC subpoenas at last month's Messari crypto conference in New York City.
Video transcript
ZACK GUZMAN: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance's All Markets Summit. All day we've been talking about solutions to problems. And so let's focus in on one piece of the market that may have been causing more problems than anything but also solving a lot of things out there this year. That would be cryptocurrency in this part of AMS, sponsored, in part, by Grayscale.
Of course, as we've been talking about all year, the specter of regulation continues to grow, and the SEC continues to answer questions about what they want to do about crypto as it surges past a 2 and 1/2 trillion dollar market cap. And for more on that, I'm very happy to bring into today's program the CEO and co-founder of Terraform Labs, Do Kwon.
Of course, he's leading the company behind Terra and their cryptocurrency LUNA, which is the 10th largest in the world behind Bitcoin after it has surged more than 6000% on the year. And Do, good to be chatting with you again today. Thanks for staying up late. Of course, we're going to get into all the specific problems that Terra is trying to solve.
But over the weekend, you guys sparked some headlines by actually coming out on the offensive against the SEC, filing a lawsuit. There after, they took issue with a piece of what you guys are working on at Mirror Protocol, which actually lets people trade synthetic assets that mirror real-world assets like stocks. Talk to me about the decision you made there to go on the offensive against the SEC.
DO KWON: So I can't comment on ongoing lawsuits investigations. But I just want to reiterate that we're happy to speak to regulators across the world to educate them on the merits and potential problems of cryptocurrency. And I think Terraform Labs shares my vision for that.
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, without getting into the specifics of this case, it sounds like there were some issues, of course, as was documented in the filing. They chose to serve you at Missouri's Mainnet Conference. Great conference. Out here in New York it was pretty well populated.
And you took issue, it seems, with the way that you were served and all of that. But my guess more broadly, what does it maybe say about the relationship between some of these leading DeFi projects right now and the way the SEC might appear to be cracking down?
DO KWON: Well, so I think more broadly, there's just an explosion of lots of different projects that are coming into the crypto industry. And usually, when there is explosion of a new industry, some of which may not fit in nicely with the existing regulatory or incumbent networks, I think that just causes a bit of conflict and friction.
So I think a lot of the tensions that are being present between some of the leading networks in DeFi and regulators in various different places across the world, the United States being no exception, is indicative and is symptomatic of what's happening in that tension. But I think through this dialogue and exchange, you generally end up with frameworks that are a little bit more accepting of innovation and change. And we're happy to be part of that dialogue. And so far, proper procedures and frameworks are adhered to.
