With the White House’s regulatory move, cryptocurrency has made a big splash

<p>An asset class that necessitates a comprehensive government-wide strategy? This is now officially considered a part of the mainstream economy.</p> <p>January was a bad month for cryptocurrency investors. The total value of the cryptocurrency market has been roughly halved from its all-time high as a months-long slide across the asset class continues.</p> <p>To be fair, it wasn't just the cryptocurrency market that suffered in January. Equities were mostly down as well. However, the stock market is already heavily regulated. The cryptocurrency market, on the other hand, is frequently referred to as the "wild west" by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler.</p> <p>Following the January market rout, there has been no shortage of financial industry luminaries speaking out about cryptocurrency. For example, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman recently compared the volatile cryptocurrency market to the subprime mortgage crisis (which sparked the Great Recession more than a decade ago).</p> <p>Krugman was cautious about anything in the crypto markets posing systemic risks in the same way that the subprime mortgage crisis did. Nonetheless, he stated that "cryptocurrencies, with their huge price fluctuations that appear to be unrelated to fundamentals, are about as risky as an asset class can get."</p> <p>The risk of dealing in cryptocurrencies is not limited to price fluctuations. For years, cryptocurrency marketplaces have been plagued by fraud, money laundering, and outright theft.</p> <p>The Federal Trade Commission recently released new data indicating a historic increase in online scams last year, and the agency is blaming the massive increase on illicit cryptocurrency investment schemes promoted on social media. Meanwhile, cryptocurrency money laundering is still a major concern. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, restricted 281 personal accounts of Nigerian users on January 29 in an effort to comply with international money laundering laws.</p> <p>The SEC has long b