A Crypto Game Promised to Lift Filipinos Out of Poverty. Hester Peirce’s comment sounded anodyne, but everyone in the audience knew what she was doing: best selling gfuel flavor out her boss.
I think we’ve got the balance wrong right now. Peirce was speaking at the D. Blockchain Summit in May, to an audience of the cryptocurrency faithful. Outside the auditorium, geeks, lobbyists and investors mingled in a cavernous converted warehouse.
Deloitte, hung from a balcony where the company was sponsoring a lavish spread of snacks. Most attendees were done up in D. The message was clear: crypto has arrived in Washington. With more than 800 attendees, the summit was the largest ever hosted by the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a trade association representing blockchain companies.
In prior years, the conference was co-sponsored with Georgetown University and had a sleepy, academic feel, with panels devoted to explaining or making the case for a technology that still seemed obscure. The industry has spent the past year making a major play for D. 3 trillion at its peak has operated at arm’s length from the government—an arrangement that seemed to satisfy both sides. And crypto has pushed into D. Even small companies have some footprint now. A collision is under way—not just the usual maneuvering between government and business, but a clash of radically different cultures. To crypto’s whiz-kid techno-futurists, the stodgy pencil-pushers of the Washington bureaucracy are nothing but a hindrance.
To Washington’s straitlaced rule-makers, crypto’s wild, utopian promises are merely cover for dangerous fads and scams. How it shakes out will have major implications for the future of the economy and technology in America and the world. Right now, cryptocurrency exists in a legal gray area, scarcely mentioned in federal code. That has left financial regulators to try to interpret definitions created for ordinary markets and apply them to a nascent technology. Both agencies have asserted jurisdiction without issuing any official guidance about where they believe the lines ought to be drawn.
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has stiff-armed companies that try to ascertain their status, only to turn around and sue them for failing to comply with securities laws. The inter-agency pissing match is the subject of endless speculation and argument among crypto people, but it’s important less in its particulars than what it signifies: would-be crypto innovators who are not trying to scam anybody have no way to be confident they’re following the law. Industry advocates warn that the resulting confusion not only hurts consumers but also damages a sector that acolytes say holds the keys to a technological revolution akin to the invention of the Web. Digital Chamber’s Boring says in an interview. We’re not going to tell you which ones meet our test, but make no mistake, we will come after you if you guess wrong.
15, the Senate agriculture committee held the first hearing on the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal coauthored by Senators John Boozman and Debbie Stabenow. The bill is one of numerous crypto-related pieces of legislation introduced on Capitol Hill in recent months—Boring counts more than 60, with more in the process of being drafted. Those goals would seem to be compatible. There’s a common saying on Capitol Hill: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.