“The crackdown comes amid growing attention in the U.S. to cryptocurrency scams, including by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SEC has brought several fraud cases against operators of initial coin offerings and last week launched a website to help investors recognize scams. William Francis Galvin, the state's secretary of the commonwealth, said NASAA's task force found roughly 30,000 crypto-related domain name registrations, many of which appeared in late 2017 as the price of bitcoin neared $20,000.”

As the battle between cryptocurrency regulation and ultimate liberation continues, United States and Canadian authorities have teamed up in a new move that is aimed at regulating cryptocurrency investment schemes. According to CNBC, members of the North American Securities Administrators Association, which contains officials from over 40 different state watchdogs are working together to provide coordinated responses to any cryptocurrency-based investment schemes, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICO’s) for example. According to CNBC:See the full coverage of this story by CNBC for yourself, here- https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/state-regulators-crack-down-on-cryptocurrency-investment-schemes.html What does this mean for cryptocurrencies? Well of course, these sorts of regulations and situations seem to be set up to help ensure the industry is able to flourish safely. By policing investment opportunities, the United States and Canadian authorities should simply just be ensuring that those involved in ICO’s etc are involved in legitimate ways and that the offerings are of course safe and within legal boundaries. This sort of regulation does pose a risk to cryptocurrency trading in general though and I suppose there is every chance that regulators could ‘take it too far’ so to speak. Unfortunately, at this stage we must trust that this won’t be the case. Hopefully, indeed it won’t, and both sets of authorities within Operation Crypto Sweep will be able to leave the legitimate cryptocurrency investment offerings alone. Many other countries that sit on the fence regarding cryptocurrencies could follow suit too. The UK being a prime example of this. Here, we already have a task force established so perhaps this method of policing could be adopted very quickly. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Either way, it is going to be very interesting to see what sort of findings Operation Crypto Sweep is able to dig out, hopefully as a result of this, we will see a much safer and organic cryptocurrency trading environment fostered by the United States and Canada.