Michael Selig, the chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading commission, on Friday addressed the hack of Binance that resulted in the largest cryptocurrency theft in history.
Mr Selig spoke about the Binance incident during an appearance on CNBC's Squawk on the Street, and said the hacking ordeal "proves our exact point in proposing regulations for crypto markets earlier this month".
The CFTC chairman then said that the prevailing issue was that the crypto apparatus was still largely unregulated and that it didn't "have the same sort of safeguards that we have here in the US".
He also said that his agency would like to make it possible for "these exchanges to come and register" with the CFTC, which would potentially help blunt future incidents.
"These are instances that we would see in our traditional markets as well as on the blockchain based markets, but of course with crypto the funds can move much more quickly," Mr Selig explained, pivoting to the idea that because of the nature of blockchain technology, the trail of nefarious activity in the Binance incident should be easily identifiable.
Binance Holdings, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, announced the security incident on Thursday and said it is still under investigation.
The company said that it lost an estimated $6.3 billion to hackers.
It's a crime that exceeds the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025.
On several social media posts, Binance said that it will cover all losses.
"Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions," its statement read.
Under the Biden Administration in 2023 the CFTC sued Binance and its former chief executive Changpeng Zhao, for allegedly breaching trading and derivatives laws.
On Friday, the company's co-chief executive Richard Teng sought to calm user fears.
"Difficult like this are a good reminder of how strong our industry is when we work together," he said in a video that lasted almost five minutes.
"Rest assured that we're working non-stop to resolve this," Mr Teng added.
Silence from Trump so far
US President Donald Trump has yet to comment on the Binance hack.
Though Mr Trump once expressed concerns over cryptocurrency during his first term in the White House, he changed his tuned during his 2024 presidential run, and several crypto firm executives donated heavily to his campaign.
In March 2025, he held the first White House Crypto Summit.
Later that year, Mr Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had been found guilty of circumventing money-laundering laws, unlawful money transmitting and sanctions breaches.
Mr Zhao – a Chinese-born Canadian citizen and the 21st richest person in the world, according to Forbes – had served four months in prison before being pardoned.
Despite existing for more than a decade, scepticism still abounds about crypto, which unlike fiat currencies lacks an overall regulatory apparatus and is mostly decentralised.
Crypto has also created a huge spike in the need for electricity.
In 2024, while giving a presentation about the US energy grid and challenges it faced, former energy secretary Steven Chu expressed concern about how much electricity crypto mining was consuming.
“Roughly speaking, half the electricity of data centres is used to mine Bitcoin-type currency,” he said.
Crypto mining is the process by which digital assets are obtained and secured through a blockchain network.
“What is Bitcoin currency used for? Money laundering and evading taxes, so half of the electricity being used for that is not a good thing, and personally I think it should be outlawed, but in any case since it's making a lot of money, there are a lot of forces saying that they don't want to outlaw it,” Mr Chu added.
Those worries about crypto energy consumption have been felt all over the world. Most recently, crypto mining was banned in several locations throughout Russia as a way to preserve energy resources.
Though it is often touted for having ironclad security, crypto has not been without problems.
Just as crypto began to hit a stride in 2014, the popular Bitcoin exchange Mt Grox was hacked, and other technical problems with the exchange resulting in the disappearance of thousands of coins.
In 2022, FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, collapsed and fallout from fraud sent its founder Sam Bankman-Fried to prison.
According to the FBI, North Korea hacked the Bybit crypto exchange this month, which resulted in the theft of approximately $1.5 billion in virtual assets.
