The Globe and Mail Neil Gross Published April 28, 2021 D-Keine/iStockPhoto / Getty Images Canada’s securities regulators sent a blunt message to the 600 or so unlicensed crypto-asset trading platforms (CTPs) operating in this country last month. CTPs were told they must register as a marketplace or dealer immediately and bring their operations into compliance with laws that protect investors and promote market fairness very quickly afterward. Most CTPs just scoffed at this demand. Many are foreign-based platforms. A few of these are big operations; others are basically a guy running a trading floor out of his personal laptop. CTPs’ libertarian vibe is their ethos, and they have little appetite for conforming to Canada’s disjointed patchwork of rules in different parts of this country. Do we really expect them to stick around and bother with all that – for the sake of accessing our puny 3 per cent of the world’s capital markets?