IANAL. When an entity takes customer deposits it gets hyper regulated, a notch or two below commercial bank. These apps circumvent those regulations by accepting deposits in crypto.
Regulators are are also in bit of a spot because it's an entirely new beast. For most of the current use case crypto acts like unregistered security but in in some minor way it's also a currency. So regulators are biding their time because coming down with a heavy hand will attract a bad rep as big hedge funds are also getting into crypto.
Also, IMO current legal codes aren't good enough to tackle crypto at the moment, see this[1] for example. It's an active area of legal research so will take time to crystallise.
So these apps are slipping through this regulatory crack. Do they deserve to go to jail? I'm not so sure. But they do know what they are doing.
The thing with crypto is it's getting rapidly enmeshed with main-street finance. For instance one can take loans against crypto, retirement accounts are offering crypto exposure and so on.
It's relatively easy to deal with money-like substances that are precisely confined (closed-loop as they are called sometimes) such as carnival tokens, or Starbuck reward points. Problem starts when they start leaking into day-to-day finances.
Regulators are are also in bit of a spot because it's an entirely new beast. For most of the current use case crypto acts like unregistered security but in in some minor way it's also a currency. So regulators are biding their time because coming down with a heavy hand will attract a bad rep as big hedge funds are also getting into crypto.
Also, IMO current legal codes aren't good enough to tackle crypto at the moment, see this[1] for example. It's an active area of legal research so will take time to crystallise.
So these apps are slipping through this regulatory crack. Do they deserve to go to jail? I'm not so sure. But they do know what they are doing.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/11/20/Leg...