You are probably aware of the unprecedented events surrounding Gamestop stock, retail investors, a potential short squeeze, and market manipulation by institutions. Thousands of retail investors like myself lost out on what could have been hundreds of thousands of dollars in gains on GME stock due to illegal abuses of the influence that brokerages and hedge funds have.
The legislation is already in place to prevent the naked shorting that led to GME being shorted 140% of float, but it still happened. The legislation is in place to prevent the unbalanced and severe effects that Robin Hood had on GME stock by blocking buy orders for GME and not blocking sells. But it still happened. The potential for the short squeeze was a mathematical inevitability, and even now the brokerages admit that the price could have climbed into the thousands, had not the price been tanked by the halt of buy orders. But it hasn't happened, and may never happen now.
We may see some punishment doled out for this, but we'll never see the money we should have made, which for most retail investors would have been life-changing. The issue therefore is not with the laws, but with the limitations with law itself. Rules against this kind of inequitable market influence and mechanical control over trading are not sufficient to prevent it. The only thing that can truly prevent it is that the conditions for this inequity don't exist in the first place. That is what decentralized finance provides.
The cryptocurrency Ravencoin (RVN) is commonly referred to as being to assets (like stock, gold, art, etc.) what Bitcoin is to money. Ravencoin is built such that asset tokens can be created to represent real assets, either in the generic sense (i.e. many identical gold bars) or in the specific sense (i.e. particular works of art within the larger asset of "art"). Such a system can be used to distribute, buy and sell stocks. It could be also be used to distribute dividends, and even potentially handle the options market.
Were such a decentralized system in place, no institution or individual would have the power to shut down the activities of other traders or manipulate stock in the way that Robinhood and other brokerages have in the GME fiasco. Regardless of the laws in place, this wouldn't have happened had the stock been represented by Ravencoin assets rather than paper certificates. As the continued democratization of finance grows and more average people enter the markets, the protections that cryptocurrencies and decentralized financial systems offer will be more and more crucial in pushing that forward.
I have invested in Ravencoin not only because of the potential profit from that growing movement but also because I like technology and believe in the principles it can be used to uphold, of fairness and liberty. If you got into crypto now you would still be early!
Disclosure: This is opinion, not advice. I have positions in both Gamestop and Ravencoin.