In January, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Alex Rampell joined the CFTC’s Daniel Gorfine and Andy Busch for a conversation about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs. With regulatory discussions just around the corner, ETHNews extracted some gems from that episode. Here’s what we found.
On Monday, May 7, 2018, senior staff from the CFTC will reportedly meet[1] with representatives from the SEC as part of a working group to discuss the regulatory classification of cryptocurrencies, including Ether. That meeting is sure to be informed by the perspectives of venture capitalist (VC) companies[2] like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures (USV) who possess investments in the space. Representatives from the VC firms actually met with officials from the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance late last month.
As was reported by The New York Times[3], at that April meeting, the companies expressed a desire for a "safe harbor" for some initial coin offering (ICO) tokens. That likely included Filecoin, a project in which Andreessen Horowitz is a major investor. The Wall Street Journal[4] reported that the firms also sought "formal assurance" that their projects would not be subject to SEC regulation. Like Andreessen, USV is a prominent investor in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space. In fact, in March 2018, USV confirmed[5] that it is one of the many financial backers of CryptoKitties[6], a wildly popular game that involves Ethereum-based feline collectibles.
In advance of Monday's regulator meeting, ETHNews revisited a podcast episode[7] recorded by the CFTC, which featured Alex Rampell[8], a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who leads the firm's FinTech investments. The episode was made in January 2018, but reposted by the agency earlier today.
