Crypto industry must ‘suffer’ for consorting with criminals

‘We have to suffer’

Mr Carnegie was one of the customers of FTX caught up in the Bahamas-based exchange’s epic collapse. Mr Bankman-Fried is currently on trial in New York, accused of using customer funds to make risky venture capital investments and donate to political causes.

Mr Carnegie said crypto’s utopian goals were overrun by “a lot of really, really scummy Ponzi schemes”.

“We were [all] part of that and enjoyed the bull market and we have to suffer, at the day of the day, collective responsibility.

“We are going to have to dig in and find a way through this bear market to actually prove what we believed about the technology, which was that is genuinely the only answer to a whole series of problems that are happening at the moment.”

Opening the summit, Mr Jones laid out the government’s proposals for the crypto sector, which along with financial services licences, included cash reserve and solvency requirements and a raft of new standards for digital asset platforms. They will apply once platforms have aggregate holdings of $5 million.

But Mr Jones also gave a specific call-out to those in attendance to help the government craft the final laws.

“We need your views because those at the front line of innovation will have particular insights on how this regulation will work best for industry,” Mr Jones said. “But we also need to ensure that we have the consumer front and centre in everything that we’re doing.”

Ryan McCall from local crypto fund Zerocap welcomed the proposals as a “positive step” that would bring Australia regulations in line with other countries.

“In terms of how it compares to what we’re seeing outside Australia, it seems to be a fairly typical approach to more or less mimic what the existing financial services regulations are.”

TikTok crypto

But Mr Carnegie said Australia’s crypo ecosystem needed to do a better job at attracting and keeping financial influencers of the future. He cited recent polling which suggested the most popular career for young people was “influencer”, pointing to a TikToker named @tom, who had almost ten million followers on the video platform.

“When he gets on a plane and gets an American visa tomorrow, he is 10x on his revenues compared to Australia,” he said.

“We’re not even beginning to engage in the bridge between the attention economy yet the aspirations of our youth and how we move that into the financial system.”