Crypto Goes to Washington
The industry is making a play for D.C.—but is D.C. listening?
Between Washington’s pencil-pushing bureaucrats and cryptocurrency’s techno-futurist whiz-kids, you could hardly find two more different cultures. But what happens when they discover they need each other? My new piece in TIME looks at the collision that’s recently begun—a sea change for the proudly libertarian industry, and a massively consequential policy debate that’s happening largely under the political radar.
Now D.C. has moved into crypto’s territory, with regulatory crackdowns, tax proposals, and demands for compliance. And crypto has pushed into D.C.’s terrain, standing up multiple trade associations, think tanks, and political action committees and hiring hundreds of lobbyists. “The industry has gone from 0 to 100 in record time,” says one D.C. consultant who advises crypto and other tech firms and has seen business skyrocket in the past year. “Even small companies have some footprint now. The venture capital firms are stacked like cordwood with former regulators.”
Both cryptocurrency and government regulation are complicated topics, and in this piece, I tried to clarify for the lay reader what’s at issue and what’s at stake in the current dispute. If you, like me and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, find crypto confusing, I hope you’ll find this piece enlightening. But as with most Washington stories, a fair amount of cynicism is warranted:
The industry says it wants rules it can live with; policymakers say they want to protect consumers and foster innovation. Those goals would seem to be compatible. But this is D.C., where finding common ground can come with its own costs. “When politicians say, ‘We hope to get this done by the end of the year,’ what I hear is ‘We want crypto lobbyists at our next fundraiser, and we’re going to milk this for at least three Congresses,’” a veteran D.C. tech lawyer says, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to be frank about how Washington really works. As soon as the law gets passed, the spigot of money turns off, or at least down. “It’s worth noting,” the lawyer says, “that in the California gold rush, the folks who supplied the picks and shovels and donkeys made a lot more than the miners.”
Read the piece here.