Earlier quoted context omitted.
No regulation would have prevented this crime from happening. I want to be clear here, what happened here is already illegal as is, and no regulation would have prevented it from happening in the first place. Hell, the firm was already being audited, and those auditors didn't catch the accounting discrepancies, so it's doubtful that any additional regulation would have found this earlier either...
You aren't wrong, maybe it's my wishful thinking. What do you think the solution is here? Do you think the house of cards stayed propped up because a lot of people were in on the fraud? Were the auditors just incompetent or were they in on it? Auditors are reasonably well known firms.
You may also take on insurance against such malfeasance on the part of the exchange, increasing your likelihood of recovering your funds. On the plus side insurance agencies now have a financial incentive to ensure the exchanges they insure are honest.
In other words, see centralized entities as the unreliable partner that they are and work accordingly.