Topps loses its licensing deal for baseball cards, and tears up plan to go public.
As cryptocurrency businesses seek to join the finance mainstream, many are following the same playbook: They hire former government officials. Bringing them onboard is one thing, but keeping them around is another, the DealBook newsletter reports.
The world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has made hiring former regulators central to its efforts to burnish its reputation. In April, its American subsidiary, Binance.US, hired the former acting comptroller of the currency, Brian Brooks, as chief executive. At the time, he said that “managing reputation” among regulators was a priority. But Mr. Brooks resigned abruptly this month, citing “strategic differences.”
Diversifying Binance.US’s ownership structure was crucial to Mr. Brooks’s plans to create a more transparent business and address regulators’ concerns. But Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, demanded to retain control, making some potential investors uneasy. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Zhao both recognized reputational liabilities, but they apparently could not agree on how to address them.
Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange — where Mr. Brooks was chief counsel before going into government — in April hired Brett Redfearn, who previously led a division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He resigned in July because of a shift in strategic focus at the company, Coinbase said.
And there’s more where that came from. Jay Clayton, a former S.E.C. chair, on Thursday joined the advisory board of the crypto custody provider Fireblocks. Greg Monahan, a former criminal investigator at the Treasury Department, joined Binance this week in an anti-money laundering role. The former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair, Chris Giancarlo, in April joined the board of BlockFi, which is in the cross hairs of securities regulators in several states. And the world’s biggest crypto venture capital fund, at Andreessen Horowitz, is run by a former federal prosecutor, Katie Haun.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/20/business/economy-stock-market-news/