'Everything's Down' In 2022 Not Just Crypto, FTX CEO Bankman-Fried Tells Mooch

Keading cryptocurrencies are not the only investments that are down in 2022, according to FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

“Everything’s down this year because dollars are up this year,” Bankman-Fried told SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci at the SALT Conference this week.

Bankman-Fried, who reportedly bought a 30% stake in SkyBridge for $45 million, highlighted that stocks are also trading down with a broad Wall Street selloff in 2022 in tandem with the major drop in cryptocurrency prices.

The prices of Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum ETH/USD are down 57% and 58% year-to-date respectively. The cryptocurrency market is now worth nearly $1 trillion. That's down significantly from the sector's $2.8 trillion market capitalization last November.

Bankman-Fried blames the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates as one of the reasons that risk assets have decreased in value.

“That doesn’t change the underlying or the fact that blockchain still has huge use cases in terms of financial settlement, in terms of payments, in terms of on-chain social media, in terms of other things," he said.

Bankman-Fried’s comments come as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY and SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF DIA are down 18% and 15% respectively year-to-date.

See Also: Bankman-Fried Welcomes Comparisons To J.P. Morgan For Crypto Bailouts - 'The Right Thing For The Industry'

Bankman-Fried On Regulation: Another topic Bankman-Fried discussed with "The Mooch" was cryptocurrency regulation.

“Some way, somehow, there has to be reasonable federal oversight of the industry,” Bankman-Fried said. “There has to be an agency, or multiple agencies that are in charge of policing the space.”

The comments from Bankman-Fried come as a debate of whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should handle oversight.

“The SEC and CFTC are the two most natural places to do that," the billionaire said. "They’re both going to have some role in doing that one way or another.”

FTX has been working with Congress to “draft legislation” on crypto oversight, Bankman-Fried said. Benzinga previously reported that Bankman-Fried traveled to the White House in May in a move that could have involved cryptocurrency regulation meetings.

“I’m optimistic we’re going to get a license," he added. "I’m actually surprisingly optimistic that that will actually happen, that a year from now, there will have been a bill for a framework for digital assets.”

Bankman-Fried is a leader in the cryptocurrency industry with FTX spending millions of dollars on taking stakes in struggling crypto companies during the bear market.

See Also: Anthony Scaramucci Makes $250M Bet On 'Google Of Crypto'

Scaramucci is a major proponent of digital assets, as well. His SkyBridge fund grabbed headlines when it began investing in cryptocurrencies. About 16% of SkyBridge was in crypto before a sell-off reduced the holdings to 8%. The firm currently boasts $2.8 billion in assets under management, but is down 25% this year, the Financial Times reported.