ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood on Staking Ban: ‘US Exchanges Lose’

In a comment, Cathie Wood slammed the ignorance of United States regulators as rumors about a possible ban on staking for retail clients accelerate.

“Decentralization wins, US exchange loses”

Today, on Feb. 11, 2023, Wood took to Twitter to share her views on the possible ban on staking services offered by U.S.-regulated centralized entities. She stressed that it would damage the competitiveness of the U.S. in this emerging Web3 tech segment.

So, activity moves to offshore exchanges or to self custody, self sovereignty, and self control? Decentralization wins. Great! Given regulatory arbitrage, however, US exchanges lose to foreign exchanges, not so good for US competitiveness in the crypto revolutions, in my view. https://t.co/1Lv4IqVsmn

— Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) February 11, 2023

In general, this ban will not ruin the ecosystem of staking coins: users will just move toward on-chain staking dashboards, or will choose services in off-shore jurisdictions.

However, in the long term, U.S.-registered exchanges will lose to their foreign competitors due to the regulatory scrutiny, Wood supposes.

As such, the U.S. dominance in the “crypto revolutions” might be on borrowed time.

As covered by U.Today previously, the industry opposes the possible ban on centralized Ethereum (ETH) staking services and other related protocols for proof-of-stake (PoS) coins.

Exodus of stakers?

Some speakers even compared it to the anti-Bitcoin witch hunt that made Bitcoin (BTC) miners move their rigs out of China. Ironically, the U.S. together with Kazakhstan was among the greatest beneficiaries of this process in 2021.

History might repeat itself: the stakers who prefer using centralized services will highly likely move their coins to other jurisdictions. As we previously reported, the U.K.-headquartered fintech heavyweight Revolut added ateking to its toolkit.

Revolut customers will be able to stake Ethereum (ETH), Polkadot (DOT), Tezos (XTZ) and Cardano (ADA), i.e., all mainstream proof-of-stake (PoS) altcoins.