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In April 2018, former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent off inquiries to more than a dozen cryptocurrencyexchanges to learn more about their internal operations. Now, after months of investigation, the New York Attorney General’s office has made its findings public.
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A report[2] titled “Virtual Markets Integrity Initiative,” released on Tuesday, September 18, 2018, confirms what many already know to be true: Many cryptocurrency exchanges do not have proper consumer protections in place and are often targets for market manipulation.

The questionnaire originally went out to 13 crypto exchanges. Ten voluntarily complied with the study, but four did not respond, arguing they did not serve customers in New York. But, after investigating three of those non-responders — Kraken, Binance, and Gate.io — the New York Attorney General’s office “referred Binance, Gate.io, and Kraken to the Department of Financial Services for potential violation of New York’s virtual currency regulations.”

Kraken, the only one of the four based in the U.S., was the most vociferous in its refusal to respond[3] to the inquiry, calling the initial request “ill-prepared” and “an overly broad fishing expedition that asks questions irrelevant to the stated objective and misses obvious questions that actually would be helpful.”

Report Highlights

The report highlights three broad areas of concern.

First, exchanges dabble in several lines of business that would normally be carefully monitored in a traditional trading environment. Platforms often simultaneously offer a venue of exchange, perform a role similar to broker-dealers, and act as money transmitters. At the same time, many also have their own large crypto holdings and even issue their own cryptocurrencies.

“Each role has a markedly different set of incentives, introducing substantial potential for conflicts between the interests of the platform, platform

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