🎙 Prominent Academic Fabian Schär Says Crypto Regulation Should Happen Only at On/Off-Ramps and Ditch Consumer Protection

Fabian Schär is one of the most prominent academics focusing on blockchains and specifically DeFi. He is Professor for Distributed Ledger Technology and Fintech at the University of Basel, has a PhD in crypto, co-authored the bestselling book “Bitcoin, Blockchain and Cryptoassets” and has published many academic papers, including one outlining the DeFi tech stack on the St Louis Federal Reserve Review.

Fabian has a great deal of experience speaking with regulators and studying different laws and frameworks being applied to crypto. He argues regulators should not be using old laws to regulate new tech. He also says regulation should happen at the off and on-ramp level, and at individual businesses, but not in the non-custodial world of on-chain transactions.

Fabian has the somewhat controversial opinion that regulators should ditch consumer protection as a goal all together, and trust that each individual should be free to decide what to do with their money, and take responsibility for their decisions.

We also talk about re-hypothetication risk in DeFi, CBDCs, and “fake versus true” DeFi.

Podcast audio and video was edited by Daniel Flynn and Gary Leuci. Transcript was edited by Samuel Haig.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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👀 Only paid subscribers have access to the full interview transcript below.