The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s enforcement director called unregulated decentralized finance exchanges an "obvious threat" in recent remarks following the agency's charges against a trio of DeFi protocols last week. 

"The existence of unregulated DeFi exchanges is an obvious threat to the markets regulated and customers protected by the CFTC, and it is one we have taken very seriously," the CFTC’s Enforcement Director Ian McGinley said earlier this week in a speech at a conference hosted by the Practising Law Institute. 

The CFTC charged three DeFi protocols last week — Opyn, ZeroEx and Deridex — for offering "illegal digital asset derivatives trading." The three settled the charges and were ordered to pay civil monetary penalties of $250,000, $200,000, and …