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BlockBeats News, December 13 — After hedge fund giant Citadel Securities submitted a 13-page letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recommending stricter regulation of decentralized finance protocols handling tokenized securities, the industry responded on Friday with a joint letter, directly stating that Citadel’s arguments are “baseless.” The letter, co-signed by the DeFi Education Fund, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the Digital Chamber, Orca Creative, attorney J.W. Verret, and the Uniswap Foundation, addressed to the SEC, stated: “While we agree with Citadel’s goals regarding investor protection, market order, and the integrity of the national market system, we oppose its view that ‘achieving these goals always requires registration with traditional SEC intermediaries and cannot, in certain cases, be accomplished through carefully designed on-chain markets.’” Citadel Securities insists that DeFi protocols may operate as exchanges or brokers that require registration and regulation. However, the new SEC leadership under the Trump administration has been seeking to give the crypto industry more policy space this year. Patrick McHenry, the White House crypto advisor, recently posted on social platform X that his office supports “the necessity of protecting software developers and DeFi.” “As we detailed in our comment letter, Citadel Securities strongly supports tokenization and other innovations that can strengthen America’s leadership in digital finance, but this should not come at the expense of robust investor protections—these very protections are what make the U.S. stock market the global gold standard,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The DeFi alliance’s response pointed out that Citadel’s letter contains “multiple factual inaccuracies and misleading statements.” Jennifer Rosenthal, spokesperson for the DeFi Education Fund, suggested that the institution is protecting its own commercial interests: “For Citadel, questioning the existence of a technology that threatens its business and significant market share is rather convenient.”

Jinse Finance reported that, according to OnchainLens monitoring, a newly created wallet received 14,959 ETH from BitGo, worth approximately $48.42 million. This address may belong to BitMine.