Ontario Securities Commission CEO Grant Vingoe said the regulator planned to unharness a report in October including crypto adoption rates in Canada.
Grant Vingoe, CEO of the Ontario Securities Commission, reiterated the regulator’s technology-neutral stance on crypto whereas saying several Canadians planned to become hodlers within the near future.
In a oratory before the Economic Club of Canada on October. 6, Vingoe said the regulative fundamentals of stocks and bonds were equally applicable to crypto contracts, with the “vast majority of crypto-based entities” falling inside the OSC’s jurisdiction. consistent with the OSC head, the regulator largely considered Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether () to be commodities, whereas “arrangements that trading platforms have with investors” constituted securities.
“As securities regulators, none of the characteristics of crypto assets or their underlying technology, either positive or negative, drives our regulative approach,” same Vingoe. “We don't seem to be here to choose winners and losers among investments. we have a tendency to take a careful and technology-neutral approach to any or all new merchandise that get our market, and we apply the same reasoning in assessing them.”
He additional that the growing crypto market turning into interconnected to the economic system probably posed a priority, citing the collapse of digital asset exchange QuadrigaCX:
“We know from our own research (being published later this month) that more than 30 per cent of Canadians plan to buy crypto assets in the next year [...] It is a challenge to bar non-compliant firms from offering services in Canada. With a limited budget and finite Enforcement staff to cover our entire capital markets, there is only so much we can do. But we are making progress.”
The Canada-based regulator has taken enforcement actions against crypto companies Bybit and KuCoin, mostly claiming violation of securities laws and operating unregistered crypto asset commerce platforms. As of Aug. 15, nine companies are listed as registered crypto businesses under the OSC, together with Fidelity Digital Assets, Newton Crypto and Bitbuy.
( Turner Wright, Cointelegraph, 2022 )