Where are the federal regulators in all this? As silly as it sounds, at some point we're going to have "investors" crying for restitution over money they lost in shitcoin ICOs, fart NFTs, and the crypto shadow banks described in the article.
We're still building consensus. This is a multidimensional policy space; I doubt any single person knows even what all of those dimensions are. It's a type of problem our federal system of government excels at solving, albeit slowly. States will experiment with policy. Down the road we can consolidate their lessons. Only thing to keep an eye out for, in the interim, are systemic risks.
The CFTC also said, in 2019, "virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, have been determined to be commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA)" [2]. They also fined Kraken for offering margin to clients, but "failing to register as a futures commission merchant" [3].
It appears the SEC also has jurisdiction over certain cryptos that have been determined to be securities as well, since they have raised several cases for those [4, 5, 6, 7].
The IRS also considers virtual currencies to be property [8].
Based on this, there is already regulation and asset classification already going on, although I do think it would be great to have more clarity and agreement between the different regulating bodies, regarding crypto, in the US. For now, maybe it's just that some cryptos aren't considered securities until they are called out to be, and the rest would be considered commodities, at least until we hear more about this from regulators.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/15/bitcoin-etfs-may-finally-mak...
[2] https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/oceo_bitcoi...
[3] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8433-21
[4] https://www.sec.gov/enforce/33-10715-s
[5] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-262
[6] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-338
[7] https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-172
[8] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...