While everyone is looking for an indication that institutional money is about to flood into bitcoin and revive the market, we just got another conformation that crypto has indeed entered the big leagues. Companies in the industry are now putting former regulators on their payroll, as is common for Wall Street mega banks, government-supported telecom monopolies, competition-stifling tech giants and the like.
Also Read: Bitcoin in Brief: New Patents, Research Centers and a $300M Fund
Another Regulator Gets a Big Paycheck
Along the announcement of its new $300 million a16z crypto fund, Andreessen Horowitz also revealed it had hired Katie Haun as its newest general partner. While most tech publications hailed the move in the name of diversity and inclusivity, due to her gender, few took note that she is yet another in a string of government lawyers and regulators who joined the ranks of cryptocurrency companies recently.
According to her bio at Stanford, Haun spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), where she focused on fraud, cybercrime, and corporate compliance failures alongside agencies such as the SEC, FBI, and Treasury. She was the DOJ’s first-ever coordinator for digital assets, and led investigations into the Mt. Gox hack and the corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force. As her impressive resume proves, Haun is no doubt a very capable and highly intelligent woman. However, she is a law expert not a venture capital or investment expert, which could raise some questions about her new role.
Free and Fair Market?
As mentioned before, Haun is only the latest regulator to make the move into the crypto industry. In May 2018, Kraken hired Mary Beth Buchanan, the former US Attorney for the
