Matt Levine, Columnist

Putting Bitcoin in the Swaps Box

Also Bitcoin futures, BCFP vs. CFPB, adviser pay, Jay-Z and probably not insider trading.

May 8, 2018 at 2:39 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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T+1 settlement.

If I sell you a Bitcoin, what have I sold you? Is it a currency? A commodity? A financial asset? A security, even? Something new and different? There are tedious debates. I suppose you might find them interesting if you’re a philosopher of money, or of Bitcoin. But you might find them important—yet still tedious!—if you are a regulated financial institution thinking about trading Bitcoins. The regulations that apply to you contain lots of lists of things and what you can do to them, and you need to figure out where Bitcoin fits on those lists. You can do some things to securities, and other things to commodities, and still other things to currencies. What things can you do to Bitcoin?