Why Lawmakers Aren’t Rushing to Police A.I.

It’s now increasingly isolated, as crypto companies like Coinbase, Circle and Paxos all said they would stop banking with the firm.

The bank is becoming an example of what regulators have warned about crypto. In January, three major banking authorities — the Fed, the F.D.I.C. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — said that the cryptocurrency business “is highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices.”

Silvergate, which began to falter when FTX collapsed last fall, “led the U.S. agencies to move faster and harder to build firewalls between banks and crypto asset firms, firewalls that will cut off many companies from the payment system and retail customers,” Karen Petrou, co-founder of the Washington think tank Federal Financial Analytics, told DealBook.

Ms. Petrou, who has been tracking Silvergate’s troubles, added that crypto companies will likely struggle to work with traditional finance in the future. (Already, some British lenders have limited customers’ ability to buy cryptocurrency with bank cards.)

Those broader implications have hit the price of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is down over 4 percent on Friday, to $22,382, hitting a two-week low.

• In other news, a bipartisan group of senators demanded information from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, about its finances and regulatory compliance capabilities amid concerns that the company’s platform suffers from a “hotbed of illegal financial activity.”

“For almost every C.F.O. that I’ve talked to who has had a policy of bringing people back to work, people are doing less than what they’ve been asked. If they’ve said they want to be back three days a week, they’re getting them back two.”

— Dave Stephenson, Airbnb’s chief financial officer and head of employee experience, on the challenge companies continue to face in getting employees back into the office to work.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/business/dealbook/lawmakers-ai-regulations.html