What I Learned About Crypto Regulation From a Week in DC
WASHINGTON – Within a 36-hour period, the first bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund (ETF) began trading, the underlying cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high and federal lawmakers dusted off their 2019-era concerns about the Facebook-linked stablecoin project Diem. I spent most of DC Fintech Week in the U.S. capital to reconnect with people I haven‘t seen in two years and put faces to folks I’ve emailed during the coronavirus pandemic but never actually met. In these conversations, I found that the policy/legislative landscape around crypto has greatly matured since my last visit. Federal lawmakers who couldnt care less in 2019 are planning to propose legislation regulating different aspects of the industry in the coming months. This feature is part of CoinDesks “Policy Week,” a forum for discussing how regulators are reckoning with crypto (and vice versa). There‘s also a better understanding of crypto. A lot of the regulatory reaction in late 2019 was focused on the then-Libra project, which was announced by social media giant Facebook that summer. Libra, at the time, was a pretty visionary project that policymakers saw as having the potential to destabilize the financial system. The project, now named Diem, has been fairly quiet over the past 10 months (this