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Asides being a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and an Economist, Nouriel Roubini is a vocal anti-cryptocurrency pundit.

Recently, he asserted that there is tremendous evidence of widespread fraud and exploitation in the crypto sphere. In his essay titled “The Great Crypto Heist”-which was published by project syndicate – published on the 16th of July, he took a specific jab at the compliance guidelines of popular crypto exchange-BitMex-.

According to the essay, Roubini revealed that he was informed by anonymous insiders at BitMex that criminals complete an enormous volume of money laundering on the exchange. He revealed that according to information from insiders, the exchanged is used daily to carry out money laundering on a huge scale by terrorists and other criminals from countries including : Russia, Iran, amongst other places, and that the exchange does not make any attempt to stop their actions as it makes revenue from these transactions.

Moving forward, Roubini also condemned BitMex’s anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations as-a-whole. He went as far as opining that the exchange is in defilement of securities laws. Roubini is opinion that at any degree, it is somewhat obvious that BitMEX evades anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations. Roubini added that although the exchange claims not to attend to U.S. and U.K. stakeholders who are under to these laws, its technique of authenticating their citizenship is to check their IP address, which can easily be concealed with a standard VPN application.  In Roubini’s opinion, the lack of appropriate meticulousness establishes a barefaced violation of securities laws and regulations.

Arthur Hayes & Roubini Go at It Live

Roubini challenged Hayes about the leverage and volatility experienced at BitMex. Arthur was not fazed at all as he talked about instruments that have extremely high volatility in traditional markets. Its safe to say Arthur knows a thing or 2 about the traditional markets as he spent years with some of the biggest firms such as Deutsche and Citi bank. Roubini talked a lot about the lack of regulation BitMex faces as it does not follow U.S financial laws with BitMex current incorporation. You can see the full video below to see Arthurs response.

Recently, Roubini debated Arthur Hayes- BitMEX CEO and co-founder-as he reminiscences in his essay. Resulting from the debate, Roubini made wrote a Twitter post describing Hayes as a weakling and asking him to release the tape. In his recent essay, Roubini revealed that Hayes has since released the video.

In his published article, Roubini also beckoned to relevant powers that be to interfere and implement regulation. He acknowledged-Steven Mnuchin-the U.S. Treasury Secretary who recently expressed publicly that to a great extent, the existing cryptocurrencies have been taken over by illegal practices and speculation. 

Roubini revealed quite a few findings to back his claim that there is tremendous indication of widespread scam and abuse in the crypto sphere.  He reported that there is a study which concludes that as much as 95% of Bitcoin transactions are fake, which he says proposes that fraud is not the exception but the rule. Another study he mentions allegedly came to the conclusion that about 80% of initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017 were scams.

It was previously reported by public channels that initial coin offering advisory firm- Statis Group-conducted a study that looked at data on ICOs in 2017.  It was revealed from the study that about 80% of the ICOs in 2017 were indeed rip-offs. Nevertheless, from the over-all $11.9 billion raised via ICOs, only about 11% of those funds were essentially used for scam projects.

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