The world’s largest public holder of Bitcoin called on regulators to finally tackle a laundry list of risky, immature crypto industry practices, or “parade of horribles”, that are unfairly weighing on the price of its asset.

Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor argues the over 19,000 cryptocurrencies and digital tokens in circulation must be viewed as “unregistered securities” that cannot be likened to a hard commodity like Bitcoin—which has no issuer, no management, no employees, no product cycle and only a finite supply.

Speaking in a webcast with NorthmanTrader founder Sven Henrich, Saylor said Bitcoin was being caught in the crossfire of a collapsing crypto market since it often served as collateral on margin loans for less proven tokens.

“What you have is a $400 billion cloud of opaque, unregistered securities trading without full and fair disclosure, and they are all cross-collateralized with Bitcoin,” he argued

He added mainstream financial institutions often won’t touch an asset like Bitcoin “because of the slime that gets onto the asset class from all the unregistered securities."

https://twitter.com/Nouriel/status/1538195958835646470?s=20u0026t=cnwpQkCr-hyscOHMc9YXYQ

Nouriel Roubini, a respected economist and one of the few to predict the 2008 global financial crisis, branded crypto on Saturday a ponzi scheme collapsing upon its own weight.

It’s attitudes like these that make Saylor, otherwise critical of government intervention in the free market during the pandemic, believe regulators should and will eventually step in to protect investors from the bad apples.

The parade of horribles

“If I make a list of the parade of horribles," Saylor said, "they’re all going to reasonably reverse in the next 10 years.”

He claimed even rock solid multinationals like Apple would see more volatility in their share price if there were no regulations that, for example, prevent wash trading, a practice of artificially inflating prices by trading between two wallets both owned by the same party.