Operation Chokepoint 2.0: Is it working? No.

Josef Je, PWN.xyz

Joshua Garcia, Ketsal

Seamus Rocca, Xapo Bank

00:00:44 - "There's an increasing belief that we're witnessing Operation Chokepoint 2.0 in action."

00:03:20 - "creating not just liquidity for assets, but also for price discovery, because that leads to stability and that leads to building the economy of things on top of all these blockchains."

00:10:44 - "there's definitely a lot of like shady stuff and a lot of like unfilled promises."

00:13:07 - "And, you know, I'm a believer in crypto. I think the tooling to get these appraisals right will get there eventually."

00:16:58 - "So you're borrowing against a physical Bitcoin."

00:20:58 - "The pressure for regulatory clarity is at an all time high from the crypto community."

00:25:05 - "I think this whole operation choke point is like some sort of real memo that was put out by some top level politicians out there to like actually choke out crypto companies and Bitcoin folks from our bank accounts."

00:28:23 - "Politics feels a little bit like entertainment."

00:31:00 - "Well, if a crypto offering is a clear securities offering, it's not for everyone."

00:33:49 - "So there's a massive disconnect between how the engineers think about this and how the lawyers and regulators think about this."

00:38:37 - "I'm a big advocate for either keeping your mouth shut or just saying what's true."

00:42:19 - "Here you have like highly regulated, amazing products that offer like great value proposition to customers all over the world by an OG company."

00:45:50 - "Hong Kong is very well placed to become a very strong powerhouse in the crypto space. And again, well, that's going to do it. It's a massively missed opportunity for the US, who could have easily run the crypto space."

00:48:11 - "Whereas now they've created this environment where people are scared of the regulator that if you touch crypto, they're going to come and smack you on the head."

00:51:52 - "If you're in Nigeria, Lebanon, Argentina, South Africa, anywhere where you're worried about country risk, you're worried about macroeconomic environment and inflation, having a dollar bank account is a luxury."

00:53:32 - "So that's certainly changed in the last few years, especially when Bitcoin was going to $65,000. It was hard to ignore it."

00:55:14 - "We're trying to say, look, we're this offshore bank account where anybody from anywhere can open an account here and you don't need to move that bank account when you move."

00:58:32 - "That literally was one of Satoshi's visions anyways, exactly what you just said."