As many know the FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan's home seizing his phone and the good ol' open-ended answer of "electronics". I had a pretty solid hunch what it was over and yesterday evening it was confirmed when I saw it dealt with the DOJ investigating Polymarket for allowing U.S.-based users to bet on the platform. Now please tell me if you have I don't know possibly heard this story before... the U.S. prohibits something in the U.S. so users find a workaround to still participate in what they want to. Hmmm sounds like something that well is EXTREMELY commonplace with easy examples with FTX and Binance both of which offered U.S.-based operations but you could also easily access their other platforms.
So why do I say this is a failure of the Biden Administration and not Congress? Well since the FTX collapse witnesses from honestly every single industry in the financial space have testified under oath that the only way to protect U.S. users is not to ban them but to rather create rules of the road for companies like Polymarket to onshore to the U.S.. Every time the House has tried to address this the Biden Admin has come out and told them nope you have to change this that or the other and essentially make it impossible for legislation to pass either the House or the Senate.
It wasn't some unknown or question if U.S. citizens would figure out a way around whatever type of barriers that Polymarket put up. People use VPNs to get around Netflix restrictions for God's sake! Polymarket was targeted specifically because of how the elections went and how popular it became. Could this have easily been prevented if the Admin had worked with Congress? Absolutely but that has not been how the Biden Admin has operated with this sector of the economy and the election results have shown crypto got the last word with how their backed candidates performed. This was a bipartisan issue that tons of Members and Staffers tried to tackle to only get stonewalled.
They also go after the platforms, not because it's just, but because it's easier to extort money from them.
IMO, platforms shouldn't be held responsible for their users' behavior, so long as reasonable safeguards are put up.
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I agree. There is only so much that you can do in certain situations and when you have tried and have evidence backing up the attempt then the government needs to look inwards to see what they are doing to cause people to do whatever it is that they are trying to prevent.
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