The Breakdown - The New Crypto Policy Blueprint, With Kristin Smith

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io, Circle and Kraken.   Today’s guest is Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association.    Find our guest on Twitter: @KMSmithDC - Nexo is a security-first platform where you can buy, exchange and borrow against your crypto. The company ensures the safety of your funds and keeps innovating with products like the Nexo Wallet - a non-custodial smart wallet that allows you to create your Web3 identity. Get early access at nexo.io/wallet. - Circle, the sole issuer of the trusted and reliable stablecoin USDC, is our sponsor for today’s show. USDC is a fast, cost-effective solution for global payments at internet speeds. Learn how businesses are taking advantage of these opportunities at Circle’s USDC Hub for Businesses. - Kraken, the secure, trusted digital asset exchange, is our sponsor for today's show. Kraken makes it easy to instantly buy 185+ cryptocurrencies with fast, flexible funding options. Your account is covered by regular Proof of Reserves audits, industry-leading security and award-winning Client Engagement, available 24/7. Sign up and trade today at kraken.com/breakdown. - “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and research by Scott Hill. Jared Schwartz is our executive producer and our holiday theme music is "Spike The Eggnog" by Two Dudes. Music behind our sponsors today is “Back To The End” by Strength To Last. Image credit: ANDREY DENISYUK/Getty Images, modified by CoinDesk. Join the discussion at discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8.  

My optimistic scenario is that we spend a lot of time on the ground in one-on-one meetings, by doing briefings, by having executives visit Washington, and that we are able to convince all of these new people who are suddenly caring to learn about crypto, that this is something that is here for good and that they want to treat it a little bit like we treated the internet in the early days. and we convince them to be thoughtful and very targeted in any legislation. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io, Circle, and Cracken, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, December 27th, and today my guest is Kristen Smith, the executive director of the Blockchain Association. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us in the Breakers Discord. You can find a link of the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, guys, today, as I mentioned, my interview is with Kristen Smith,

who leads the Blockchain Association in Washington, D.C. Blockchain Association is a member organization with more than 100 members advocating for better public policy around crypto. They, as you might imagine, have had a very active year. And in this conversation, we talk about just how different 2022 ended up from where it started. We also get into what the real state of play is around crypto politics and what the blueprint for crypto's DC efforts are post-SP efforts are post-SPF. All right, Kristen, welcome to the breakdown. How are you doing? It's great to be here. Excited for 2023.

Yeah. It's saying with much understatement. So, no, I'm really excited to get your take on how this year has evolved. I think you've been kind of a firsthand witness to a lot of changes in terms of, you know, crypto and where crypto sits in the D.C. arrangement. I guess just for folks who aren't familiar with you or your work, just get a quick background on what you do and what the Blockchain Association is. Would be great. Yeah.

So my name is Kristen. I run the Blockchain Association. And we are a trade association based in Washington, D.C., that focuses primarily on federal public policy issues. So we have 109 member companies and we work with these companies to develop public policy positions. And then we go lobby Congress to enact these positions. We work with the regulatory agencies. And then sometimes we get involved in different litigation matters that could have a public policy outcome. So really, whatever means is available. Also as a part of this, we do a lot of education with policymakers because

This is obviously very complicated space. So we've been around for about four and a half years. We have, I think we're up to 16 or 17 people on the team right now. And our sole focus is to get good public policy for the crypto industry. This has certainly been a year that will be remembered as a pivotal year, I think, for public policy in the crypto industry. And, you know, it's obviously, it's almost hard to kind of go back pre-FTX collapse, I think, in terms of, you know, the implications. But I would love to try to kind of wear. things were maybe heading into this year, you know, when the blockchain association was mapping

out goals, priorities, hopes for 2022, you know, what were some of the priorities, what were the goals? And how do you think the industry kind of made progress or not on, you know, what you were hoping to see in D.C.? Yeah, well, it's interesting. If I look back across the year, we actually did make a lot of forward progress, but primarily because of FTCS, we also had a major setback. You know, last year at this time, we were a couple months coming off of that infrastructure battle that happened in the House and Senate in the summer of 2021. For the Blockchain Association, we had received a tremendous amount of interest in membership and new funding, and so we were able to turbocharge the team last year at this time.

So a lot of our goals were to try to get kind of the foundation in place in order to be more effective in Washington. But on the public policy side, our goal at the time, was really to, you know, capture the energy that came out of the infrastructure debate in order to make crypto policy a more partisan issue. In the past, it had been, you know, we had more Republicans that were interested in this than Democrats, and there was a real effort to bring Democrats on board. And I am excited that we did make some progress on that front, particularly in Congress. there were several comprehensive legislative proposals that did have problems in them. They weren't perfect.

But they were bipartisan. And the fact that we had so many different bills on so many different crypto-related topics that were bipartisan was actually a really, really, really important step forward. We've also had some emerging members of Congress that have been really strong in asking questions in committee or writing letters and doing other types of legislative tactics outside of introducing legislation. We also saw the Biden administration and the Treasury Department in particular acknowledge the importance of digital assets for the first time. And they did enter, you know, this executive order process. The results of that weren't ideal. But the fact that we did have the acknowledgement that this was a valuable space from the Biden administration was also very encouraging. So I did feel like we were making a lot of progress in expanding the number of people who are knowledgeable about the cryptocurrency.

ecosystem and who were thinking about creative public policy solutions. But then obviously the situation with FTX has been a major step backwards. Sam was very involved in lobbying members of Congress personally. He had built a lot of relationships with regulators. And I think the fact that he was apparently a total fraud has been a pretty big setback. I think the good news is he's not the only one that's been working in Washington, there are a lot of good organizations and individual companies who have been engaging for a long time. We're going to continue to do that work and clean up the mess that Sam has made. But it's no question that this is a pretty big problem that Sam has left us with. And it's going to take a lot of work in Q1 of next year to pick up the pieces and really go back

to basics of convincing policymakers that crypto is here for good and is something that is very valuable for the world. I thought we had kind of gone beyond that initial stage, but the FTCS situation has brought us back into justifying our existence to begin with. Yeah, so I want to dig into a lot more of that in just a moment, but I do think it's worth spending a little more time on sort of, you know, some of the points that you made about what was accomplished, because it's very easy right now. I mean, I think I'm sure you're feeling it. I'm certainly feeling it to get kind of lost in the the fight that we now have to have that we didn't expect it to have to have. And I, I think, think that it would be understating a lot of what was accomplished, at least from my outsider perspective

in D.C. If nothing else on the how many or what percentage of Congress and the Senate actually took the time to learn about these issues in a different way. And I feel like it feels like the difference between some of the more recent conversations, especially in Congress more than the Senate, I would say, as opposed to where we were a year ago with the infrastructure bill or even hearings before that, going back to the Libra hearings, it seems like a marked difference in just the number across both sides of the aisle of congressmen and women who had taken the time to actually engage in what approximates good faith with these issues and start to come to conclusions or at least try to make up, you know, some perspective even if they weren't at the conclusion stage yet.

But it seems like, you know, to the extent that there's anything that will limit the fallout of sort of this fraud and betrayal, it's the fact that people had taken some amount of time to actually learn and engage with the industry on their own terms. Do you think that's true that, you know, or is it sort of an overly optimistic kind of point of view? Yeah, no, no, I think that was optimistic. I mean, even if you look back to December of last year, December of 2021, we had the hearing, which Sam was at, in the House Financial Services Committee, and there were representatives of different crypto CEOs that were on that panel. And I remember talking to the head of a general tech trade association who said that hearing was hands down the best most productive

conversation on any tech-related issue he had seen in years. They're used to going after Facebook and things like that. We had made a lot of progress. We'd seen a lot of new Democrats jump in like Kirsten Gillibrand from a senator from New York and Richie Torres and Jake Ockincloss and Rokaneh and the House. There were a lot of new voices that were, emerging, that we're interested, that we're really open-minded to the fact that crypto networks can build better financial infrastructure and be the foundation for a better internet. We were starting to get buy-in into those ideas. Because as you can imagine, if you're starting with somebody who's not familiar with crypto

at all, you can't have just a single conversation and allow them to fully understand it. It really does take a series of conversations and they have to want to be open-minded to sort of imagining the future. I think for the most part, Washington isn't as forward-looking as, you know, we'd like them to be. You know, crypto is evolving and it's still, I think, fairly early stage. And it's not something that is completely obvious on its face. And unless you really understand how the other systems work today and how this is an improvement upon that. So, yeah, I was feeling pretty good about things.

up until this fall, you know, when the DC CPA was moving forward and Sam was pushing that bill and even that I thought was problematic because we've sort of for the first time saw the industry split in its approach to legislation, which was largely driven by Sam and FTX having a different strategy than the rest of us. And then obviously when FTX imploded or got caught or whatever you want to, whatever phrase you want to use, that that is kind of the ultimate setback. And, you know, even today, There's, you know, what, five weeks since this has happened, you can't look at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and not have a major headline about FTX at the top of it. I mean, this is a story that keeps evolving that has captured the attention of the media in a very wide way. And, you know, Congress responds to headlines. And I don't see these headlines easing up anytime soon because the story keeps evolving and there keeps being new developments. And that's going to make Congress. want to do something. We can go into kind of the outlook for 2023 if you want. What's interesting is last year, we had a fairly defined group of bipartisan lawmakers that were interested in doing

something that would benefit the growth and innovation in the crypto industry. What we have now is a much broader group of policymakers, many of whom don't know crypto very well. And And there's now this new narrative that has emerged that maybe we should just not allow crypto to happen at all, right? Like we heard Sherrod Brown talk about this on Sunday talk shows over the weekend. There's this idea that crypto shouldn't even exist. Obviously, that's not going to happen. But when you have members of Congress who chair key committees that are questioning our existence

and then you have members of Congress who are really thoughtful and want to help crypto, it kind of leads to a stalemate situation because I think the gap between those two schools of thought is so far that until we can answer and meet this demand for new people to new members of Congress to understand why crypto is valuable, we're not going to be able to cut a deal because there are some people that just don't want to see a deal cut. And so in some ways that might be good because that means we're not going to get legislation, bad legislation that happens. But it also means, I think it's unlikely that we're going to get a targeted stablecoin bill done that would be good for the stable coin industry or a very targeted centralized spot market bill that would be good for, you know, institutional investor confidence and in crypto markets, et cetera. So I guess depending on how you look at it, this stalemate could be a good thing or a bad thing.

But I don't think it'll last forever. I think we can break through it. There's just a tremendous amount of education that's going to have to be done in the, you know, first and second quarter. of 2023 in order to break that impasse. In an ecosystem where innovation is the norm, it's the basics that are in the spotlight. Nexo is a company that has never put the safety of clients' funds in question. With over 50 global licenses, $775 million in insurance, and a real-time audit of custodial assets, Nexo sets an example for security standards in the industry.

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this new blueprint looks like. And, you know, starting with the, you know, one of the things that we saw a lot this year was big, comprehensive overarching legislation. It seems like that's, you know, that's, you know, sort of off the table. And what we're looking at now, what people are introducing is much more targeted sort of specific legislation. Is that a piece of it? Or is it really, do you think that the dominant kind of characteristic is going to be the stalemate that arises from these two forces? And so it's sort of just what you can do to fill the void in the meantime while that stalemate happens. I think we're going to see both, right? You know, the new Congress is sworn in at noon on January 3rd. And at that point, all of the legislation that's been introduced over the past two years is off the table.

And anything going forward that's going to be considered is going to have to be newly introduced. And so I think we're going to see a lot of the bills that we've seen this past year, the DCCPA, the DCEA, the LEMISDL brand RFIA, and then smaller bills that target tax issues, the Keep Your Coins Act, the Responsible Financial Innovation Act. We're going to see a lot of these reintroduced. There might be changes and tweaks to those bills. We'll see Elizabeth Warren's bill reintroduced. Some of these are comprehensive. Some of these are targeted. I think if there's one issue that actually could break away and go as a standalone bill, it probably is stable coin legislation because there have been so many hearings on this issue going back to the announcement of Libra in 2019 that Congress feels pretty confident, I think, in what needs to be done there. And the Treasury Department also really wants to see something done there. So I think there's a chance that that one moves as a standalone bill. But oftentimes there's something that happens in Congress where a couple members of Congress will have one issue and they see that a piece of legislation that is related but different is starting to move.

And what they'll do is they'll hold up that bill in an effort to attach their piece of legislation to the moving vehicle. So there'd have to be a pretty precise deal on stable coin in order for that to go alone. Otherwise, I think any attempt to move any piece of it is going to be slowed down by other lawmakers who want to add other provisions to that bill. So, yeah, the game in Congress, I think, is really going to be focused on education. I think we're going to see a lot of hearings, which is good if we can get good witnesses selected for those hearings. But I think the real game for 2023 is probably going to be in the courts. It's going to be seeing what the outcome of the ripple cases, the grayscale lawsuit. We've got the Uki-Dao at the

litigation at the CFTC. We've got the Wahi case at the SEC. I think that seeing how that plays out in the courts is going to be probably where any new policy comes from. This is not an ideal situation. I think policymaking tends to be better when you have a more open process. and you're not confined to like a single set of facts of a certain case. But I, you know, that just might be the world that we're living in for a while until we can get Congress to a point where they get more excited about crypto again and want to do something positive for the ecosystem. Well, and it did seem like that was a trend even before the sort of Sam-related implosions

happened of crypto companies not being willing to wait and just taking, you know, legal action because it's sort of, you know, they couldn't wait any longer, right? I mean, that was starting to happen throughout this year. Yeah, no, I think there was a big shift this year. I think for a long time, you know, when the SEC did an enforcement action, the trend was just to settle. But as they've escalated and other agencies, too, have started to engage in this kind of regulation by enforcement zone. I think it's really encouraging to see companies willing to spend, you know, tens of millions of dollars. These are very expensive litigations in order to push back and,

fight these things. And I think, depending on the situation, there's very good process arguments or even constitutional arguments with some of these proposals don't work. And, you know, given that the legislative process is a challenging one, a very slow process, that, you know, having this other avenue as a means to achieving good policy is great. Now, the flip side of that is we could get very bad policy out of this. It's a little bit risky. But I think at this point, I'm encouraged, and maybe we could add this to our list of positive things of 2022, I'm encouraged to see individual companies and executives willing to foot the bill to fight back because it's our right to do so.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's been kind of my reflection, too, throughout this year, is that it hasn't seemed like sort of nuisance, you know, fights or contentious fights or, you know, sort of a flummoxed throwing the hands up and saying, okay, if this is the path that we have available to us, of the path that we'll take. How do you think personnel changes going into next year's Congress and Senate will influence things? Obviously, we have, you know, there's some good in terms of, you know, people like Representative Patrick McHenry, you know, moving into kind of the chairmanship of his committee, but then we also lost some people like Senator Toomey who retired. How does it look like on balance to you or is it too early to tell?

I think it's going to be good. I mean, I'm going to miss Senator Toomey so much. He is such a fantastic and articulate champion for this space. He's absolutely great. So it's a huge loss that he decided not to run again. But I do think, particularly on the House side, having Patrick McHenry at the head of the Financial Services Committee is going to be very good. He understands this space really well. He has a lot of relationships and connections with the crypto industry. And he wants to get something done that helps. He's also willing to work across the aisle, as we've seen this past year. He's made a lot of progress in stable coin discussions with Maxine Waters. So I think for him, this is going to be a top priority. And,

you know, this guy's a pit bull, right? He can get things done. And, you know, I can see him making a lot of progress getting legislation through the House. Similarly, GT Thompson, who is going to be the new incoming chair of the House Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC, he's going to be in charge. He's going to be in charge. He has a great piece of legislation called the Digital Commodity Exchange Act, which is different than the DCCPA in the House, the DCEA, or I'm sorry, the DCCPA in the Senate. The DCEA in the House is really targeted at centralized crypto exchanges, unlike the DCCPA, which captures DFI as well. And so it's not a perfect bill, but it's definitely the best starting point I've seen for CFTC exchange regulation. And so, you know, I think having GT Thompson and

Patrick McKenry running those two committees in the House is probably the biggest boon to us. You know, the other thing that will be interesting, which is a little bit harder to predict, is if there are going to be changes in the administration. You know, we've heard rumors for a long time that Yellen didn't want to stick around for all four years and that there may be some changes in January. You know, whether or not this impacts other agencies, it's sort of hard to predict. but it is fairly common that in the middle of a presidential cycle, you know, some of the appointed officials often step down and let somebody else take a turn in that role. So we'll

be watching that as a well, again, a little bit harder to predict what's going on there. But we could see some changes that, you know, depending on who replaces them, may be good are maybe bad for the industry. Are there red flags that were kind of visible in the past that should be noted by the crypto industry going forward as they think about sort of, you know, the side of crypto that you deal with, it's interaction with public policy and lawmakers. You know, you kind of mentioned this fall when FTX really started to diverge with the DCCPA was where it started to become clear.

But is there anything that's sort of like, you know, if we're trying to take lessons learned from this that that's worth noting. Yeah. No, my, my spidey sense went up on FTCS back in the spring. You know, I think that policy takes time, right? You can't sort of force and jam this through. There's sort of a cycle. It sort of starts with education and idea of brainstorming phase and then actual action on

legislation. And what was interesting about FTCS is they came in with two things. One is they had this proposal for the CFTC that would allow margin derivatives trading in kind of an almost too cute by half approach. And then they were a very, very big force behind the DCCPA, very active in pushing for that legislation. And the problem, as I mentioned before, with DCCPA, well, there are many problems. But the large one is that it captured Defi and a bunch of other entities that probably don't need to be regulated. And the fact that these policies were sort of put forward without consulting the rest of the industry, I think, is problematic.

I think most people in crypto are, it's a very collaborative industry, right? We're used to working on projects asynchronously or used to working in different chat rooms together. There's a lot of communication back and forth. So the fact that a single company just sort of drove ahead with what they deemed to be the best strategy, I think is a problem, mostly because the proposals that were out there would have benefited FTCS in a way that would cause harm or disadvantage to other players in the ecosystem. So it wasn't really a comprehensive approach. It was very an FTCC-centric approach. I also think political giving is a really important part of the policymaking process and that it allows

an opportunity to build relationships with members of Congress and candidates and to, you know, get in front of them and talk about what's going on in the crypto ecosystem. I think the level at which FTCS executives, particularly Sam, engaged in political giving, has also set us back. It appears that they very clearly were trying to buy the passage of legislation. They were working with leadership offices. They were very big and engaging in super PAC activities and different campaigns. And it was at a level that, like, most industries don't do this level, right? Like, it was so over the top that it doesn't appear to be, you know, sort of a genuine, like,

hey, we know you have to find where he's let's get in front of you so we can meet you and build relationships with you. It really was almost like a quid pro quo, at least optically. I don't know whether or not they intended that. I don't know, but I think that that's a red flag too. Like you can't like just come in and like upend the process by writing a bunch of checks. It's an important piece of it to do some of that. But you really have to have the right messaging. You have to have the right policy ideas. And you have to make the case to members of Congress that this is this is going to benefit their constituents. It's going to

benefit U.S. competitiveness. And I think the political giving was a little bit over the top. is going to make it harder for some members of Congress to want to engage with crypto when it comes to political giving. So it's a pretty massive problem there. So just by way of wrapping up, you know, you got into a little bit of this, but, you know, what's your most sort of pessimistic or concerning scenario for next year? What's your most optimistic scenario? And for folks who are in the crypto industry, but outside of this sort of day-to-day of this sort of process, how can they slash we help? not just things closer to the optimistic versus the pessimistic scenario?

Yeah, I think the pessimistic scenario is that as a result of FTX, there is consensus that a very comprehensive legislative proposal needs to be enacted that doesn't take into account the differences between different actors in the ecosystem, specifically defy and self-custody. That's what I worry about is that the same types of rules and regulations for centralized entities will also apply to other infrastructure that isn't centrally controlled by anyone in the industry. Kind of like the DCCPA, something like that I think would be very bad and set the United States back. My optimistic scenario is that we spend a lot of time on the ground in one-on-one meetings, by doing briefings, by having executives visit Washington. And that we are able to convince all of these new people who are suddenly caring to learn about crypto that this is something that is here for good and that they want to treat it a little bit

like we treated the internet in the early days. And we convince them to be thoughtful and very targeted in any legislation that they move forward. I do think that we can do that. We have a whole strategy in place with our member-com. companies and we've even reallocated a person on our team to be in charge of nothing but coordinating our education efforts on a full-time basis. So I think we can bridge those gaps. But it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of meetings on the Hill, a lot of time in front of lawmakers. And I think we can do it, but it's going to take a lot of work.

In terms of what individuals and companies can do in this space, I think there are a couple of things. First, they can support the organizations on the ground that are working on these issues. So, you know, like the Blockchain Association, like Coin Center, the Defi Education Fund, there are others. But these are groups that are trying to coordinate people and then are on the ground doing the work every day. You know, companies can also hire policy people in-house to kind of help be a part of that effort. But I think supporting the existing efforts so that they can grow up and be more effective, is really important.

Second of all, I think what individuals don't realize is it's actually fairly easy to meet with your congressman or their staff. You just call them up and you request a meeting and you can do it in home in the district or you can do it via Zoom with someone in Washington. But having conversations about what you're building and why it's valuable and being part of that education process, I think is really important. And then sort of lastly, I think actually just making progress on building new protocols that power really cool applications and services that people want to use is maybe the most

important thing. Because I think today a lot of what we hear is, well, I don't know anybody who does anything with crypto or all I see is that this is an asset that you buy to speculate and it goes up and down. I think convincing people that there's a lot here that can be built and that this is a foundational infrastructure layer that more things will, upon which we'll. more things will happen over time, I think is super, super important. And so, and I guess if there's a fourth thing I'll add is that there are going to be key moments where we need the community to rise

up and weigh in with regulators or lawmakers. You know, we have tools that can help do that. Like, we will make it very easy when needed for people to write their member of Congress or, you know, file a comment letter. And, you know, we know in Washington when the right time is for that. We don't want to do that every day because we can't be constantly seen throwing a fit. But there are going to be times where we need to have a very loud voice. And so I think being engaged in what's going on in the crypto community and when the call to action comes, if we can get individuals to weigh in, that can be incredibly effective. I actually think it's one of our most powerful things we have as a community is our ability to activate in a time of crisis or hopefully in a time where we're trying to get something proactive and positive

done for the ecosystem. So, yeah, there's a lot that people can do. I think, you know, staying engaged, participating with the community in this effort. And, you know, if you're a company being willing to throw some resources behind it, there is a pathway forward. We'll get beyond this. I'm incredibly confident of that. But, yeah, it's not as good of a spot as we were in in this summer when there was a lot of positive momentum around getting good bipartisan legislation done. Well, I am hopeful. I'm optimistic that we can return some of the momentum, certainly from where it is now, and appreciate all of your and the rest of the blockchain association's efforts towards that fight. And thanks for joining the show again today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, guys, back to NLW here. Not going to lie, this one was tough. I feel so much for the folks who have done a ton of work in D.C., especially around the long, unsexy process of educating, not just our politicians, but their entire staffs. It sucks that in so many cases now, it's like back to square one for them. But at the same time, it's clear to me that all that work was not in vain, that there are some incredibly strong allies that remain in D.C. What's more as annoying as it is to have to re-answer and relitigate fundamental questions

like why this should be allowed to exist. Frankly, a lot of us in the space are re-answering those questions for ourselves anyway, so I guess we're all in it together. I have a lot of optimism for the ability of the D.C. contingent of the industry to grow and to grow now, frankly, in a healthier way. I really appreciate the work that Kristen and the Blockchain Association and all of our folks in D.C. are putting in, and I'm looking forward to a fresh year of those efforts. For now, I want to say thanks again to my sponsors, nexus.com, and Crakken.

And thanks to you guys for listening. Tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.