Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State in the United States insists on stricter regulation for cryptocurrency markets to guard against technology manipulation by nations such as Russia and China.

Clinton’s comments on digital currencies were an extract from a Nov. 24 interview with MSNBC TV news host Rachel Maddow, where they discussed the manipulation of social media platforms by certain nations.

The warning she issued was directed at tech innovation of all sorts, and states as well as non-state entities were able to use them to disrupt countries and destabilize the dollar. According to her,

There’s one other thing that’s on the horizon which people are only beginning to pay attention to, and that’s the need to regulate the cryptocurrency market. […]You can imagine the power of social media combined with the ability to amass even more money by controlling certain cryptocurrency chains. […] We’re looking at not only states such as China, Russia, or others manipulating technology of all kinds to their advantage.

She emphasized the possibility of combining social media platforms that have been used for disinformation to influence elections with cryptocurrency markets in order to aid state and non-state actors to destabilize other nations.

Although Clinton didn’t mention any pattern with which these manipulations can occur, some potential use cases could be via manipulating markets, manufacturing hype, or even engineering a financial crash through social media troll farms.

Recent developments have seen many countries consider using crypto to get around economic sanctions imposed by the United States. North Korea is one of the countries that has made use cryptocurrency in order to finance its nuclear weapon program. To avoid detection, the country also used privacy coins and other means.

The Iranian government also supports cryptocurrency. Saeed Muhammad, commander of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called on Iran specifically to adopt cryptocurrency as a means to bypass sanctions early in 2020.

Clinton recently spoke against the US dollar’s global dominance by pointing out the dangers that cryptocurrencies can create. She opined at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Nov. 19 that while cryptocurrencies are an “interesting” technology, they can also have negative effects on the United States and other countries, “perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger.”

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