Crypto Advocacy Panel Livestream

Transcript

all right welcome everyone to the crypto advocacy dual panel we are super excited to launch off this git coin around 12 with a brand new round for crypto advocacy and i'm joined here by scott moore from get coin and connor spellsie from the dow research collective and we are talking all about advocacy for crypto with our regulator body regulation bodies uh our lobbyists our governmental agencies uh and also uh like i said kicking off this brand new round for get coin grants uh and i believe everyone knows about bitcoin grants but for those that don't i'll throw it over to scott to talk about what bitcoin is why we're doing this and what is new in get coin round 12 thank you so much david so get going

grants is one of many experiments bitcoin is running around digital public goods the goal of bitcoin grants in particular is to leverage this tool called quadratic funding to find ways to basically get the community to signal their preferences for various types of public goods within web3 so the idea is essentially that you have a pool of matching funds in this case donated generously by the ethereum foundation others and you have a series of individual donations during the round which happens for two weeks starting today and that round will basically your donations will be deciding where that matching pool goes so the idea is essentially to leverage the wisdom of the crowd leverage the community's sort of support for these initiatives to help us decide in the future what other public goods we should see in the world

and the reason this is so important is that like you know historically we've relied on a lot of different mechanisms for funding public kids at a local kind of like national level it's very hard to figure out ways to fund these things at a global level now that we have global networks we can sort of find better ways to hopefully do that we are also joined with connor spelsey of the dow research collective connor has been a key member in moving this regulatory conversation forward and has also been a key member in organizing this particular panel uh so connor uh thank you for for helping move the needle forward can you also just talk about why why now crypto seems to be really up in the front of the regulatory conversation so why is this conversation so important and what are we trying to

do here on today's panel i think in part why now is because we're lucky enough to get a little more interest in advocacy we've certainly been working at this kind of stuff for a long time with the blockchain association i think is about three and a half years old at this stage but um luckily or unlucky in some ways for us the infrastructure bill happened and when that fight happened drew a ton of attention on crypto twitter got a lot of people mobilized and help them to understand that we're going to have to work with regulators and policy makers if we want to really make this an ecosystem that allows for the kind of innovation that we want to see in the states and really around the world yeah so to kick this dual panel uh off we will have our first panel which will

be uh moderated by myself we're bringing on kristen smith from the blockchain uh association also brian quintez former cftc chair who we've also had on the banquets podcast and also tamika tillman uh sorry kristen i'm gonna mute your video because we're not actually coming on yet uh but we will get there soon uh and so and that will be my first panel uh and that is all about really the basics of lobbying why does lobbying exist as a thing uh it's not going to be unique to crypto many industries have started lobbying uh before before crypto uh and so we need to learn about what uh what have other industries learned about the lobbying efforts and what can we apply to the world of crypto uh and what do we have to lose if we don't do this and then conor will be taking over for

panel two connor do you wanna intro your panel and your guess as well yeah so for panel two we're gonna have uh jerry britto i think everyone knows and loves from coin center same deal jake travinsky formerly of compound and now the blockchain association luckily uh joined very recently an amazing addition to that team and then sarah roth godette from fight for the future and i think a lot of people know fight for the future from the infrastructure bill battle all that they did to uh help folks you know get in touch with their senators uh they helped a number of other fronts and so we're going to hear more about specifically how they did it because your point there's a lot of associations that people in crypto and people not in crypto have about lobbying but in many ways it's a critical part of uh of the

legislative process in the states and i know that our panelists and your panel can also speak very effectively to that but what we're going to be hearing from them is what they do on the ground how this actually works because so many of us who aren't in dc um and who are in capitals around the world don't understand what the rule-making process is but it's going to be really critical for the success of the industry and while the listeners are listening to these panelists into these conversations i ask them that they go check out git coin round 12 the crypto advocacy advocacy panel uh for get coin there is a link right in the youtube description there are a number of crypto advocacy efforts that you can donate to towards and these donations will be matched by this 800

000 matching pool donated by the the ethereum foundation and a number of other efforts connor can you excuse me scott can you just give us a little bit more color of who's in the crypto advocacy round and just a little bit of the dynamics about like where should people consider donating their money to absolutely it's actually nine hundred thousand dollars as of about two hours ago so we're almost at the million dollar mark which is the most people have ever had for a single pool so we actually had a million dollars in total for the matching pool last time now one individual round which of which there are many in the current sort of like two week period uh is actually a million dollars as well so that's a pretty amazing just like side note but in terms of who's actually in the round it's a lot of organizations that i think

people know on the one hand so coin center blockchain association folks that have been doing this and are very much embedded in the space but to your point david i think there's also a lot of organizations that people don't really have an understanding of such as fight for the future uh and such as for example uh you know freedom the press foundation who have been doing a lot of work in this area and you know like really fighting for rights um around these sorts of uh initiatives for the last you know several years and so i think that it's a it's a kind of interesting group to you know experiment and explore this space with because we're going to get to see sort of how people interact both with traditional crypto advocacy organizations and then also with a broader pool of like groups that historically have been sort of on the uh

from the web 3 like kind of a core perspective fringes with a conversation that now can be more central um i can also definitely uh take a quick moment to screen share and like walk through some of the grantees that are up there let me just find that here just to make sure that i have the right setup uh ready to go but the major piece of the round that i think is actually um really important is that every donation that's made ends up donating giving a signal to the matching funding donors who are really you know the largest organizations that are part of this round at the moment um maybe i'll uh pass it back to you david and then you know as we get this up and running here uh once i actually get my screen share

going you can continue on from there yeah i think everyone who is listening everyone in crypto should um the the topic of crypto lobbing is is uh lobbying is a topic as as old as time as long as there's been governments there's been lobbying but crypto is very very unique in that we are an industry about money crypto is about inherently about money and so is lobbying and that that combination has never really been seen before first we have this industry that needs to have lobbying advocacy efforts but it's also got its own you know money systems behind it and so while while lobbying is as as old as time we've yet to see a lobbying industry that has the combination of being about money and also uh is full of an industry

of really really passionate people uh i do expect a crypto have the crypto industry has one of probably going to be one of the largest single issue voting industries that's out there and that industry is also about money and so uh lobbying is nothing new but lobbying with like the amount of just energy that crypto has with the money that crypto has behind it is going to be something i think that's going to be really really powerful but i don't want listeners to think that this is just going to build itself like this this isn't just going to magically unfold in the way that bitcoin has where it just works uh we are actually going to have to try we're actually going to have to put efforts and boots on the ground and so that is what uh some of the the lobbying efforts is is going to have to

do here this week with bitcoin around 12. scott you ready to show us some of the uh the crypto lot advocacy uh efforts that people can fund uh with uh bitcoin yes absolutely yeah can you see my screen with payloads yeah we can perfect so i would just know by the way this is the first round that we're doing this we want this to be the first of many right now we have approximately i think it's 10 or so grantees including electronic frontier foundation open privacy uh civics unplugged which is actually a new entrance to the web 3 space at large but it's been doing a lot of work in terms of grassroots gen z sort of uh advocacy for you know technology the pacific northwest rural broadband alliance excuse me uh freedom the press foundation the caribbean blockchain

association reboot which has been doing a lot of work kind of having this technical optimist balance between you know what we're talking about in the regulatory space and what we're talking about with again like kind of the new generation of folks coming in and like experiencing this technology for the first time fight for the future where um i can't you know say enough good things about just as an organization that's been um maybe underrepresented in their work in a space for a long time coin sensor which i think people are very familiar with and i am a huge fan of personally similar with the blockchain association and then the tour project which has been doing a lot of just you know technical work in terms of how we actually progress this technology for uh the last 10 plus years so um it's a really great starting group if

you think there should be other organizations in this round and have not you know had a chance to reach out please do um not scotland or on twitter or anywhere else just let me know and i can try and add them to the round if they pass the sort of checks and balances of the committee that's approving them for this particular pool um and yeah david i'll pass it back to you yes we are about to get into our first panel but uh before we do you can go ahead and put away your checkbooks but you can open up your meta mask and your ledger and open up bitcoin round 12. again there is a link in the youtube descriptions uh if i had a visual counter of you know number of donations on the screen i totally would put it there but we are not that tech enabled

yet uh but uh again like this this uh event is all about uh channeling money into efforts that fund and for advocating for crypto advocating for our industries and again there are there are monies behind our industry and so when we can pay people to advocate for them the monies become more valuable so at the end of the day the money gets returned back to you guys uh scott connor thank you so much for joining me on this intro connor we will be seeing you later for the second panel of the day and scott we will be seeing you again at the close of this whole entire event thank you for joining me uh so i'm going to ask you guys to turn your cameras on i'm going to ask our panelists to turn their cameras excuse me you guys turn your cameras off panelists please come and turn your

cameras on so we can get the first panel on the road we are joined by brian quintenz the first one to turn on his camera uh you guys might remember remember him from our bankless podcast that we did with him the other panelists are probably frustrated because i turned their cameras off and they need permission to turn it on so there is that and there is that we are also joined by kristen smith from the blockchain association and tomica tillman from a16z i just introduced all three of you but i also want to give you guys a chance to introduce yourselves a little bit of your backgrounds uh and we will go in the order that camera's turned on so brian if you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do uh what you have done and what you are doing now with regards to

crypto i would greatly appreciate it thank you thanks dave it's great to be with you really appreciate the invitation to join this uh incredible event uh through get coin and um the ef's uh contribution to advocacy efforts for crypto um i'm brian quintenzo as a former cftc commissioner from 2017 through just uh this last august of 2021 before that i was in the financial markets working at an investment firm and forming my own investment firm in particular focusing on investing in the banking sector during the middle financial crisis which was a fascinating experience uh and prior to that i was working on capitol hill as a policy aid for a member of congress from 2001 through 2007 in particular deborah price

uh congresswoman from ohio who was at that point the fourth ranking member in the house of representatives fantastic brian kristen let's turn to you kristin of the blockchain association which is one of the bitcoin grants that you just recently saw on the screen so perhaps consider donating there kristin tell us a little bit about yourself your background and what you are doing in this space yeah so i am kristen smith i'm the executive director of the blockchain association which is a trade association that's been around doing advocacy on behalf of the crypto industry for almost three and a half years now as connor said conor helped bring all this together back at that time uh and my background is i've been in washington dc for almost 20 years i worked as a congressional staffer

you know for two members of the senate one member of the house and then since then have been working as a registered lobbyist and continue to be registered as a lobbyist in addition to the work of managing uh the trade association so i know what it's like to be on both sides i was up on capitol hill um before a group of members of congress this morning and um it's really been wonderful to see the crypto community and the crypto industry grow in this space i still think we have a way to go ways to go before we can actually um stop be playing defense and start playing offense but excited to have this conversation today and really excited about the growing interest in the crypto community um in

being a part of the policymaking process here in washington defense versus offense i really like that we're going to come back to that as a topic later uh last but not least tamika of a16z you want to give us a little bit of an introduction about who you are your background and what you are doing in the world of regulatory crypto advocacy absolutely pleasure to be with you and thanks for all the great work that you david and your colleagues are engaged in around this conversation uh i am global head of policy at andreessen horowitz for the the crypto team uh i came to this space after a wild and circuitous journey uh many years ago in my youthful days when dinosaurs roamed the earth i was involved in a bunch of senate and

congressional campaigns and then while i was finishing up my phd i went to work for a little-known delaware senator named joe biden uh ran a big chunk of the world for him on the senate foreign relations committee for many years and then got a request to go over to the state department from hillary clinton to be her speechwriter did that job for a while and then led a team for her and secretary kerry that operated a little bit like darpa for the state department and built out projects at the intersection of innovation and advocacy all over the world i then went to an organization called new america which is kind of a pert think tank part technology accelerator led a lot of projects with governments all over the

world and in the us uh using distributed technology and decentralized systems to solve big problems that they care about and did a lot of policy work in that capacity as well and then joined a16z this summer oh congratulations on joining a16z i think i recognize a few of the names that you listed joe biden hillary clinton i think i think we uh listeners might know who those people are uh and so guys thank you again for coming and joining us on this panel uh you guys have expand expand a very wide sphere of different areas of the world of regulation and advocacy and so i think uh the the different perspectives that you guys all bring to the table are going to be supremely useful and but as we all know crypto people tend to be a

little bit anti-political anti-government and it's kind of in crypto's nature but there's also a decent amount of crypto people who understand that this fight is about them no matter what uh one of my favorite uh phrases is that you might not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you uh kristen i want to start with you since uh so many people in the crypto industry might need some some just education about this effort why do we lobby why do industries lobby what do they have to gain and what do they have to lose what are the very basics of this question yeah no i mean listen governments create and enact laws they enact regulations uh that impact the the industry and you know we've seen over the past uh several

years many enforcement actions when different companies may or may not you know have been out of compliance and so they're very real world consequences to the rules of the road i think it's particularly important for the crypto ecosystem and the crypto industry to engage with policy makers because what we are building in this community is really complex and just fundamentally different than anything anyone has seen before and what we've seen is the the if you look at kind of the crisis points over the past couple years like this infrastructure bill that was very poorly crafted or the midnight rulemaking that secretary mnuchin was trying to push through last year

a lot of it was just driven by policy makers that just fundamentally didn't understand the basics of the technology or had misconceptions about the uses of it and so getting in and doing the education um it takes time because these people are very busy they have a lot on their plates um but having conversations over and over putting faces to an industry um have being a resource when new topics come up and and engaging in the process really is going to lead to better policy outcomes um and i think as much as many of us would like to pretend that that stuff doesn't matter it does and there are real world consequences and so if we want to have a seat at the table we gotta show up at the table

ryan with your time at the cftc i'm curious to know if you were the subject the object of uh lobbying efforts at the cftc or if the cftc is at large and do you have any color to add about successful lobbying efforts versus unsuccessful lobbying efforts and again why people lobby at all in the first place absolutely i mean i mean the derivatives markets are highly complex uh some of the corners of the tourist markets are very bespoke um the uh trading methods execution methods uh reporting obligations uh paperwork requirements you know all of the regular the regulatory suite can have different impacts on different

business models on different um intermediaries on different end users and just and different risk managers and so you know i don't necessarily think of lobbying you know as a as a negative term i view it as just a form of education as a policy maker to try to understand what people in the real world are dealing with and how my potential decisions could impact them and how uh prior decisions you know are affecting them or could be changed to have a beneficial or a more negative outcome and you know you think about the derivatives markets as a whole i mean the cftc over overseas you know 400 to 500 trillion dollars in

notional value of derivative instruments and those are futures contracts on on energy products on precious metals on agricultural goods on um uh interest rates and financial products and then there are swaps on on credit and um and equities you know all aspects of the economy are touched by the derivatives markets and are touched to some extent by cftc regulations and you know people in these roles and in the role i was in and policy makers on capitol hill they're very busy you know they have to make a lot of decisions about a lot of different topics and um it's very hard to get educated on all of them and so you know i view lobbying as

an educational effort sometimes it's from a specific interest perspective and sometimes it's from a broader perspective but all in all it's about someone communicating to someone else their experience and what they know and what they think you know a right outcome could be tamika with your experiences at a16z what has it been like to work on just the education and policy and lobbying effort uh is it is it easy do uh politicians want to understand uh what's that like well let me answer the question with a story uh and this will sound uh at best tangentially related at first but i promise you i'm getting there a few years ago i took my kids to yellowstone

and when we went to yellowstone due to some questionable decisions by their parents my kids had not spent time uh in in a big national park in the west previously and all they really knew was that there were bears and there were these scary thermal features and and they hadn't heard that much about it beyond the fact that it was scary and a little bit dangerous and we got there and uh very early on encountered some amazing forest rangers that sat my kids down told them what they needed to know and got them to a point where this amazing ecosystem that had previously been kind of terrifying to them all of a sudden opened up and became really exciting and something that they cared about and wanted to protect and wanted to experience

and our work with policy makers is kind of similar to that you have a lot of folks who have for lack of a better analogy been stuck in the city for a long time they've heard that there's this ecosystem out there but all they really know about it is that they're occasional bear attacks and our job is to take them into this incredible vibrant dynamic new universe help them to experience it help them to understand why it's valuable and ultimately to become champions and defenders of that ecosystem and the way that all of us are champions and defenders for the ecosystem um so that's that's the mission and fortunately we're finding that a lot of policymakers are open to this they understand that the status quo

is neither desirable or sustainable they are tired of living in a web 2 world where their information and their personal data is manipulated and used against them on a daily basis and used against everyone they're looking for an alternative and we have a pretty good story to tell in that regard well i'm a big fan of stories and i i think that story definitely exemplifies what hopefully this this progression looks like hopefully we can convince regulators of all the good merits about crypto while also as an industry allowing regulators to regulate out the bad sides of crypto which we all know do exist uh so i actually want to go again in in reverse order uh just because uh so again tamika with you uh the way that

i view uh lobbying the lobbying industry at least with regards to specific industries is the lobbying industry is an industry within an industry right so we have the crypto industry and then we have the crypto lobbyists which are a zone industry but inside of the larger umbrella of crypto and this this smaller smaller part the lobbying side it has its own story of maturation development progress i'm guessing uh where would you say we are as a crypto industry where we are are we on the spectrum of maturation of our of our lobbying efforts are we are we getting good yet or do we still have a lot of improvement where are we in the grand spectrum of of development well the short answer is we're not where we need to be but i think we're moving

quickly in the right direction um we've had a lot of great work by kristin and others uh who have been uh trying to encourage the industry to to move toward uh more cohesion and coherence in the interactions that we're having with policy makers but it's important for all of us to understand at the outset that we've been pretty delinquent as a community in engaging a lot of the constituencies that we should have been talking to over the last decade uh and and by virtue of that there's a pretty big gap in understanding and a pretty uh high degree of suspicion when it comes to working with the community so we need to own that we need to do everything we can to get over that

and we also i think need to recognize why we haven't been more effective to date there's been a lot of fragmentation in the engagement that has occurred with policymakers to the extent we have disagreements and lively debates within the community that's great but when we go up and talk with policymakers for the most part they're not very interested in that and so we need to do a better job of having a high degree of coherence and cohesion in the messages that we're bringing to policymakers i think we're also seeing a very um quick maturation process in the aftermath of the infrastructure bill this summer that was really an

inflection point both for policy makers and for the industry as a whole and you know there's an old saying in washington if you're not at the table you're on the menu and i think that finally we're seeing a lot of key actors uh within the crypto community the web3 ecosystem recognize that fact and start to come together to shape policy in a constructive manner going forward brian how would you rate the crypto industry at our skills at lobbying and where are we in our development of our lobbying efforts as an industry well i think i think from a technical perspective and an expertise perspective it's very good

um i think you know the the the youthfulness of the sector as a whole means that um there isn't yet the focus by the entire community and the industry that these efforts are are are critical to the success of the space um you know you look at kind of what i would normally deal with in my prior role at the cftc uh large financial institutions trade associations that have been around for decades uh that have you know dedicated a professional staff um like you know kristin is now you know developing and and others are developing um you know they're used to uh having a process by which they can come together

and try to speak with one voice and i think to micah's point you know it's natural for any um any person any institution or any specific sector to have different perspectives on what may be the the most positive or the correct you know policy outcome uh to something it's easier when there's a negative you know against which to fight that everyone doesn't like um so you know there's there's there's none you know it's understandable that there are differences of opinion um but you know in my prior role and i think in many um members of congress's mind and from what i saw on capitol hill there's also you know a desire to to hear

a consent a consensus opinion you know what does the industry think as opposed to what does one individual voice think and i think that's where we are all you know trying to work together uh to develop you know speaking with one voice or coordinating on some of those messages or those potential policy outcomes kristin as somebody who is right in the middle of this fight right at the heart what would you say are crypto's strengths when it comes to uh advocacy and lobbying and what should we what strengths should we really lean into uh and what weaknesses do we really need to plug the holes of before we can really have effective lobbying yeah so the strengths are not even necessarily the industry itself but the ecosystem surrounding it what

happened with infrastructure that fight for the future was like hugely involved in making happen is we got 41 000 phone calls into the united states senate like that it happened over the course of five days other industries would die for that kind of engagement and that kind of mobilization and that wasn't because we'd had this you know big grassroots strategy no it was literally because this is a really communicative industry that knows how to get into forums on reddit get into you know crypto twitter like people communicate and they can mobilize really quickly so that is a strength again that's not necessarily an industry strength per se but like the entire

ecosystem of developers and participants that are out there um i think where we are on the things we need to work on um you know i are are coming into play um coordination i agree has been an issue in the past but that is i think starting to shift i mean i think if you look just within like the membership of the blockchain association for example last year at this time we had about 25 member companies this year we have 65 member companies so we have more people coming together to try to work out the arguments on the on the front end before going to government um but then there's also just been a lack of resources and um just to kind of throw out a couple rough numbers

you know i like to tell people i'm super upfront about the finances of the blockchain association in 2020 last year our budget was about 2 million dollars by comparison the valve manufacturers association of america spent more money than that in 2020 right and you know they don't have the complexity of the issues that we have it's pretty easy to explain what a valve is if you compare that to other sort of established mature trade associations the american bankers association spends about 200 million dollars a year on their trade association kind of more maybe what i think where we should be trade associations like um um you know like the entertainment

software association um or the modern markets initiative those fall somewhere between like 20 and 40 million dollars a year of operating budget for those associations so this year's been wonderful the blockchain association we're closer to about 10 million dollars now so we're on our way to being a mature organization but you know you need booths on the ground to do multiple functions right so just so you know sort of how a trade association is structured which is again i should back up trade associations are just one piece of the puzzle right you need to have individual companies you need to have advocates that are not related to industry but in terms of trade associations

we are very focused on federal public policy so we have a wonderful policy team led by jake schravinski who's going to be up here next that they develop the positions and we work with all of our industry members to figure out where we want to be and then we have a government relations team that and consultants that work with the government relations team that have the you know relationships with government that can take the positions that the policy team have and go push those out but you need other things too right you need basic operating expenses you need a communications department you need to deal with member services and bring new members in and all of this you know it doesn't pay for itself and when you don't have money going to

those types of really it's people at the end of the day right because it's a very politics is like a very personal thing it's a lot of face-to-face um it's a lot of one-on-one conversations and so um unfortunately we can't reinvent the lobbying playbook like we're reinventing you know the internet and financial services playbook um but we can use those tools and if we get money into place um you know then then we can be effective and again go from being like i mentioned before defensive to being authentic but all of that's coming together there's a lot of companies hiring a lot of seasoned professionals from washington that are you know being put on the the broader payroll and so um i'm the most

optimistic i've ever been about our chances of getting good policy in washington and that kristen is exactly why we are doing this this live stream this panel with a git coin uh advocacy round uh the more money that we can funnel into these organizations that are fighting the fight for us the more resources they have to expand and i'm gonna try and say this at least three more times crypto the industry is about the recreation of money therefore our lobbyists should have a lot of money behind them there there's a lot at stake here and if we are an industry about money we should be able to fund these things and so again go to the git coin round 12 advocacy page and see uh which of these grants that you want to donate towards

kristen i'm going to start this next question once again with you there uh tamika was talking about how a lot of these uh a lot these uh regulators they do understand crypto and once they are shown the light they do seem to hopefully accept it but not all regulators are like that uh one name that comes to mind is elizabeth warren she seems to really have an anti-crypto bias so what does it take to actually gain the trust of of our regulators because when lobbying efforts come and knocking on the door and say hey you should you know you should give our industry an olive branch and let's do us a favor as a regulator they're probably like well like what are your real motivations here so is it hard to establish trust with

regulators and what strategies have we tried that we know work in order to actually establish trust with these people yeah well there's a couple of different factors that i think that go into it um first is and this would help us across the board having more everyday people using crypto in beneficial ways is going to be our our best weapon right um if you look at uber uber was successful because people were using uber um as we get more and more applications being built on top of crypto networks and everyday people's lives are improved it will be more obvious because when you start to get into you know proof of work proof of stake what are all these you know you lose people right like what members of congress know is like what's useful and

what are their voters and their constituents utilizing and caring about um i think that's that's the biggest thing so everyone out there building please keep building and do it fast because that will be most helpful but you know there's a couple other pieces that i think are important one just having relationships where you can have a dialogue are important and part of that is done you know via direct lobbying some of it is just from lifelong friendships policymakers have had with people a big component is political giving and you know participating in fundraisers and and letting people know that there is you know kind of a little upside um you know if they start to engage in this space so building out the relationships is important

and then sort of the third is messaging um and different members of congress um or different regulators respond to different messaging right regulators care very much about the mission of their agency and so it's figuring out how to work within that framework policymakers have a wide range of issues that they care about and i think this is actually something that's challenging we have so many different messages out there that resonate with different types of lawmakers in particular that it's hard to just package it all up into one thing that hits and that lands with all of these you know different different policymakers but you have some that will care about financial inclusion you will

have others that care about fighting big tech um you will have some that are worried about competitiveness with china others that are trying to figure out how to create more jobs and spur innovation here at home and so there's a lot of different messages that are out there and and that's one of the reasons why that you know one-on-one communication is so important is because we can tailor our messages to the interests of that lawmaker and so i do think there are some overarching themes that everybody cares about but um there are some that are specific and and that you know can be used to turn someone from a skeptic into a champion or the very least

neutralize them that's that's helpful too at the end of the day getting some of the people out of the way is half the fight to micah with your experiences at a16z has it been difficult to gain trust of the regulators well i think there are two sides of that um you know i like a lot of folks who come into the space have pretty long relationships with a lot of the the individuals that we are engaging and those are pretty trusted relationships and and so they uh i i believe them if they tell me something they're gonna believe me if uh if i tell them something so at an individual level we're building on a pretty firm foundation i will say there is

long standing skepticism of the industry and the ecosystem and that's something we need to work on i think there hasn't been enough engagement to kristin's excellent point policy makers need to see the technology being used to solve problems that they care about that's not happening enough right now we need to do more when it comes to issues like financial inclusion we need to do more to reach populations and constituencies that the policy makers are trying to represent uh and and that's something that we need to take on as an ecosystem and frankly make some investments uh to support uh those types of efforts going forward as we do

that we will find it easier and easier to establish trust with the broad range of actors that we need to be engaging if we want to see policy evolve in an effective direction going forward this is a very surmountable challenge to kristen's point we are in a much much better position to do this than just about any new innovative technology in the last 50 years because this is a technology that at its core is based on communities and political leaders and policy makers serve communities if they're doing their jobs right so we are are uniquely positioned to deliver uh and and deliver some really good outcomes but we need to

do a better job of demonstrating how these tools can be used to address challenges that policy makers are focused on ryan since you're on the receiving ends of things what strategies have you seen uh lobbying efforts work when it comes to gaining trust and you know uh respectfully infiltrating the minds of the regulators yeah thanks so um i guess when i when i was in my my prior role um i i think you know to micah's spot on a lot of this you know if you're thinking about this as an educational initiative you still want to trust the person that's you know providing you that education um and so having a trusted relationship with the

counterpart is coming in to you know discuss these issues policy issues um is is critically important and it you know that's that's one thing to kind of pick up on as advocacy you know in this space expands as there are more boots on the ground there is the opportunity to have more messengers that can be those trusted intermediaries for different members or different regulators so that the message is received what you don't want to have happen is um have the right message in the wrong messenger you know there are some members that will listen to some segments and and won't listen to others on both sides of the aisle and you know as as more boots are on the ground i think we have an opportunity to bring

the right messengers with the message uh you know to those members um to have more better results um so you know in in my world you know it was it was it was broad in terms of the um you know the spectrum of the economy upon which it touched but it was also narrow in terms of the number of people within kind of the financial system in the financial sector or in the end user community that knew enough of the details and could translate those into policy terms and engage you know with regulators and someone like me that has a market's background but not a legal background and not a an extraordinarily highly technical derivatives background um that i could you know that i could trust

and get an honest assessment around the implications of different policy outcomes and different policy solutions um whether or not something was working whether or not something you know could be improved upon um and at the end of the day it was up to me to try to verify that if i thought i needed to um to get a diverse array of opinions to see whether or not there were other others to consider and then make my own judgment you know according to my philosophical you know uh beliefs and the data that i had at hand along with those those arguments and um and that's something we just have to we have to be aware of too that sometimes you know philosophical perspectives play as big of a role you know in in in advocacy and the results

of this as anything else and sometimes you just can't commit someone that you they should move off of a typewriter kristen earlier in the show you talked about going on the offensive rather than just being a defensive industry does the line uh the best defense is a good offense apply to regulation as well and what does having a good offense actually look like and mean when it comes to lobbying efforts yeah well i think um you know i sort of divide our advocacy efforts into two buckets we have um just the base basic education right it's making sure people understand the trends in the industry what's going on how it works so that they can make

informed policy decisions but where we really want to be is coming up with ideas and figuring out what changes we need and going and advocating for those changes the problem that we have had that's gotten in the way of both just our education work and going out and proactively pushing things is we'll have these crises come up where someone in government starts moving and we have to drop everything that we're working on and turn and give our attention to that so you know it happened last year with mnuchin's rulemaking you know we were starting a climate initiative and all these other things and then it's like all right team drop your pencils like we're all focused on this problem right now because again there's not enough of us that can do all

of the different things that are out there i mean thankfully that's finally changed and we're getting a lot of wonderful experts in this space um but you know there are if you look at you know the securities umbrella there's multiple issues under there tax again multiple tax issues um there's climate uh around bitcoin mining there's that issue um there is aml kyc there's stable coins any single one of these could have a team of people that are dedicated and focused on that right you need somebody to come up with the materials you need someone to think through the policy positions and work with the lawyers to examine the existing laws and then you need to do an education campaign and it's actually not even just

education of policy makers it's education of coalition allies in washington right other groups that might be interested in this it's educating all of the new lobbyists that are being hired to work on this that don't actually know anything about crypto you know there's just so many pieces that that need to be be done and you can have that for each individual issue and so i think the more funds that come in i mean we we are spending mo a significant amount of our time at the blockchain association right now just trying to play the role of coordinator because what's great is a lot of people are getting hired but what's not great is if all of those same people go and talk to tom emmer tom emmer is great he

knows our stuff he's going to be a champion for life he's a congressman from minnesota who was very early um you know in the crypto space but like we've got him we need to go to an office of somebody who doesn't know anything about this and start to educate them and and get them up to speed and we can do that but it requires a lot of coordination um the good news is i think what we found out during like the infrastructure fight um this summer is we're actually pretty good at coordinating across the industry um and it's not just companies within the blockchain association you know we were on calls with coinbase and with square and we were all in common google docs and we're on signal chats and you know there's a lot of because we're such you know used to

communicating used to be working remotely i'm telling you other industries don't have that they do not understand speed at which we can make decisions and think and and that that's an advantage that we have um but we just need to make sure as we bring more people into this space that we're doing it in a way that's value-added and not just duplicating or complicating the efforts that that are already in place kristen i'm hearing you say the word education a number of times is education really the common denominator for this whole effort is it just education all the way down is that really what moves the needle the most um education is definitely helpful um you know to be you know maybe unpopular political giving is a super powerful tool um if

members of congress know that hey if i do something positive for the crypto industry the crypto industry is going to do something positive for me i.e the host a fundraiser i mean that honestly is super helpful um you know i've seen a lot more of that going on in in the past couple of months which which i think is great um but listen at the end of the day if you're dealing with members of congress now again they're a little bit different than the regulators but members of congress and the most you know the core the thing that keeps them up at night is am i going to get reelected how do you get reelected you get votes how do you get votes you do things that your constituents care about and you raise a bunch of money to tell them all the good

things so that you know they can get re-elected so um listen this goes back to if we can get a bunch of people using this and loving it and being huge fans of the space and finding ways to reach them and get them politically active you know the policy makers will follow um it's it's uh that's that's the best way to do it but but education is big um especially when preventing you know sort of these um policies that have unintended consequences it's it's um you know very complicated space to try to get up to speed on quickly i think as all of us know i mean i'm still learning things every day and spent all day long reading about all the cool cool stuff happening in this space so um yeah we got boiling it down and making it easy to understand

is um is is a process but it's a process that we can do and and i think we'll eventually you know kind of start to close that education gap it's happened a little bit but we've got i think a long way to go well panelists i want to thank you guys for carving out time and your very busy schedules to come on the show and help educate about advocacy and so i want to wrap up with this one last question for each of you uh we are coming to a close on 2021 which was definitely the year that the crypto industry woke up to the fact that we actually do have to participate in politics and in governmental discourse so looking into 2022 what are some reasonable some some lofty but reasonable wins that you want to see

from the crypto industry by the end of 2022 what should we really be focusing our attention on uh and so we can really get some nice w's under the belt tamika i'll start with you i think we should approach the 22 2022 elections as the web 3 midterm i think politicians on both sides of the aisle need to recognize that the margin of victory in virtually every tight race in the country will be determined by voters that care a lot about this issue and that those that are committed to building a better internet those that are building committed to building a better financial system that works for more people are going to get a lot of support and those that are on the wrong side of those issues

are are going to face unhappy voters at the ballot box i think that's going to take some work to get us there but i'm cautiously optimistic we can make it happen 2022 as the web 3 election year i think that is a meme that i'm going to try and get me and ryan to to just meme into existence so thank you for that one tamika brian i wanted to turn to you what wins does the crypto industry really need to get achieved in 2022 i yeah i think building off of tamika's comment um that you know there there's there's so much in crypto for everyone and um as we see uh and through my work with tomica at a16z as we see

policymakers from across the political spectrum get educated you know they they turn from skeptics to supporters um i think we are going to see and i would love to see you know bipartisan pieces of legislation be introduced that show the breadth of support um the different the diversity of support that crypto can have politically i think that's going to be a big wake-up call for a lot of folks that view this you know through one particular lens either philosophically or economically and kristin what are you looking for wind what wins are you looking for at the blockchain association in 2022 and how can the industry help you yeah no i think

what we need to do this year is build the machine to steal sort of fred ursum's phrase he talks about building a political machine we need to build the machine that can allow us to go on the offensive and i think the pieces are coming together but if you know you're running a company and that valuation is a billion dollars or more you should have a team of people in washington that are coordinating with all of those other companies um you know we're just now starting to see these large companies bring in internal teams hire a head of policy or a head of government relations uh you know up and up until a couple months ago there really wasn't a whole lot of that happening in dc so we need more of those people coming in so i think if we can i

mean my personal goal is let's build the apparatus and then we've got the winning arguments we've got you know the playbook that we need to run we just haven't had enough of an army to go do that so if we can build the army this year uh then then i think that's going to tee us up for success but i agree with tamika too if we can have this become a campaign issue in 2022 that is also going to be a game changer well bankless listeners can look forward to that just being injected into their ears over and over and over again brian kristen and tamika thank you so much for coming on for this first of two panels for this bitcoin round 12 crypto advocacy summit thank you for your time and again thank you for your efforts with actually

advocating for our industry and just bringing awareness to all the good that crypto can bring to the world thanks thank you david all right guys that concludes our first panel of today's live stream if the first panelists guests want to go ahead and either leave the zoom or put their cameras on mute so we can bring in panelist number panel number two connor i'm going to welcome you back on to the stage so you can introduce our panelists we have jake schravinski sarah gaudette and jerry britto who i'm bringing into the zoom right now uh they might feel a little bit thrown into the weeds but uh before i uh uh give the reigns over to you connor you want to introduce what is happening next in our second panel of

the day and also introduce who is going to be on the panel with you yes thank you david and thanks for uh all the produced panelists who contributed there that was an amazing conversation so for our panel right now we are going to have a discussion with sarah with jake and with jerry about um the scene in dc helping to demystify what's happening getting a sense of trends politically what we're seeing um kind of get in some ways i don't you know i don't see the insider view but the view that the average person in crypto the average crypto stakeholder doesn't get every day so um yeah we can jump into it from there all right with that with the panelists the the next next panel come on the show and while they do that i

just want to remind people to pull out not your checkbooks but instead your ledger or your meta mask and go to git coin and peruse all of the various different grants that you can donate to one of them is at the blockchain association of which uh we just uh we just had uh we are now actually also having jake on as well uh so uh uh connor i will hand it off to you for panel number two thank you david we need one of those uh kind of old-school rotary phones like we need a phone bank behind you with just people you know answering the lines that's that's step two that's summit number two absolutely um but thank you um so let's get into it um i'm gonna start by briefly introducing everyone and then just having them introduce themselves sarah is the executive director at fight for the future jerry

is executive director at coin center and jake is at the blockchain association um doing a ton of good work i think head of policy is the title but i'm sure that you wear many hats there so uh maybe we could start by everyone introducing their themselves and their organization and this is a three-parter themselves their organization and um what your focus is on crypto advocacy uh so let's start with those who turn their camera on first i'm gonna go sarah jerry and then jake sure yeah i can jump in hello folks thanks connor and david for for organizing this panel today um very very honored to be here with uh with jake and jerry in particular um so yeah executive director of fight

for the future um we were founded in 2011 so just approaching our our 10-year anniversary our mission is to fight for technology to be a force for liberation and empowerment rather than exploitation and oppression so we see decentralized peer-to-peer software including cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects having real potential to create alternatives to big tech monopolies in particular and their abusive practices going back though we were one of the organizers of the first bitcoin black friday we you know were one of the first non-profits to accept crypto donations we've long been enthusiastic about the potential of the technology more recently we helped supporters file nearly four thousand comments i think to vincenne and the treasury to oppose the

proposed surveillance of crypto transactions in this past august when the infrastructure bill contained as i'm sure has already been discussed deeply misguided provisions around cryptocurrency that would threaten the the software developers trying to create alternatives to to big tech and would you know also harmful surveillance also would create harmful surveillance requirements for the artists and creators we helped direct a huge backlash in the form of over 40 000 calls tweets that reached over 20 million people and that resulted in lawmakers making you know an attempt last minute to fix the provision with an amendment that that failed due to the obscure senate rules despite the the bipartisan support um so now in addition to supporting you know the legislation that's been introduced to fix most of the bad provisions in the bill we're scaling up

our work i'm sure we can talk more about this but our biggest priority at the moment is to build a broader community of human rights organizations who will fight with us and that's off to a pretty good start great thanks sarah and jerry great um well thank you very much uh connor and all of you for having us here um so i'm jerry brito uh i'm executive director of coin center and point center is an independent nonprofit uh based in d.c uh focused on the public policy issues that affect cryptocurrencies and open permissionless blockchain networks so things like bitcoin there and the like um we've been around for just about seven years a little bit over seven years now

and we exist because these open networks um very much like the internet are unowned public goods and so as a result of that there's a bit of a collective action problem who you know you've got trade associations like jake's which we work closely that look after the interest of companies in this space but who looks out after the interest of the networks as networks and the rights of individuals and developers to build the networks and connect and assemble as networks and to use networks and do so freely and privately and so that's what we exist to do and we do that basically in three ways education public policy research and advocacy

uh education's work spent a lot of our time and it's focused on making sure the policy makers understand what the stuff is and how it works so just plain english just the fax information so much of what can go wrong with regulation policy making is not out of males but out of ignorance and so we want to make sure that they want to pick up the phone and call bitcoin pick up the phone you know and call decentralized network they can't hopefully they can call us and we can give them just the facts about it as we have these conversations though inevitably we get questions we don't have the answers to oftentimes because these are questions of law where the technology has outpaced the law and there's a gap and policy makers are probably going to want to fill those gaps and so that's where we engage in the

second thing that we do which is public policy research where we identify gaps identify alternative ways one might fill those gaps and uh we make a recommendation uh and the criteria that we use what we recommend is we want to help regulators meet their ends whether that's consumer protection investor protection anti-money laundering whatever it may be while preserving as much as possible to freedom to innovate and avoiding unintended consequences and certainly respecting constitutional rights um and the last thing we do is advocacy right so we lobby for our preferred solutions um and again we're non-trade association we don't represent anybody uh we don't have members we are basically just

self-appointed champions uh for this technology and folks who support us do so without any [Music] influence over what we see and do and we hope that they like what that is and then volunteer they could support us again if they liked it um so that's what we are um a lot of our work is um you know in contrast to to sarah's work which is very activist focus which is awesome and we partner with them and love the work that they do we're very much behind the scenes um working with policy makers um sort of elbow to elbow hey how do we get the right policies in place to make sure it benefits everybody

sometimes that goes off the rails and we have to get into a fight um which is where we work with sarah and work with jake publicly um uh but oftentimes it's very much behind the scenes kind of work thank you jerry and thanks for making that distinction too because i think that's a question we get a lot is what are organizations actually doing and why do we need more than one um and we certainly do need more than one and one thing i didn't mention at the top is that all these organizations fight for the future coin center and blockchain association are of course in get coin round 12. so there are organizations that you can donate to and your donations will be matched um through that very generous matching pool with that let's go to jake yeah well thank you and first let me

apologize for my dog who i think is barking at a delivery that's coming right now so sorry for that um i'm sure that'll stop in a second but um i'm jake schravinski i am head of policy for the blockchain association we are the premier trade association in washington dc we have a membership now of about 65 members consisting of the largest and most successful u.s crypto companies ranging from exchanges to custodians to software development companies focused on d5 to nft projects and everything in between um i think jerry actually did a really phenomenal job of describing sort of the difference between coin center and independent nonprofit think tank and the blockchain

association an industry trade group uh our job is to represent the interests of the industry to policymakers and i think by extension the interests of the community of customers and users who are also you know using these uh these decentralized networks um in terms of what we're focused on and i also think jerry sort of nailed the three main categories where we're engaged in all the same types of efforts around education policy development and advocacy i think i would add a fourth which is we may also get involved in litigation i think one thing we haven't mentioned so far is oftentimes we educate policy makers and regulators we

come up with policy initiatives and solutions that we think are both good policy for the industry for the users and also for government and sometimes we just can't reach an agreement among all the stakeholders and when that happens we sometimes have to vindicate our rights in court so um those listening may know me from my prior role as general counsel of compound labs uh d5 developer that originally created the compound protocol uh i am a lawyer and i think in addition to being head of policy i may find myself as head of litigation at some points um in terms of just what i what we're focused on now um you know i think there's sort of two buckets uh in terms of how we think

about our efforts in dc and also in the states i think part of what we do is very reactive uh we are hearing from policymakers who have ideas about what they think should happen with the industry or with regulation or legislation and we are reacting to those uh those ideas either through education or uh advocacy the other bucket is the proactive bucket right us sort of figuring out what do we think good policy would look like and i think that flows from an understanding that financial market regulations were not designed with a decentralized financial system in mind and that that you know applies whether we're talking about

decentralized money in the form of bitcoin or decentralized protocols for other types of interactions in defy or other non-financial use cases of blockchains like nfts or social tokens or anything of that nature and so what we really have to do and i think something that um requires more focus moving forward is coming up with what that public policy framework should look like and then advocating for an amendment to the current laws so that we can we can move forward uh here in the u.s so i'll i'll leave it there because i'm sure we have a lot more to cover um thanks oh all exciting stuff um and maybe even so now that we are more familiar with all your organizations to take a step back maybe starting with

jerry here i'd love to go high level on the perception of crypto among policymakers and regulators today kind of trends you're seeing issues that are important to them you know whether they're actually important to them or not i think it was great in the first panel brian i believe uh michael maybe two flagged that a huge part of this and kristin everyone is education of course and it seems like um you know at times we're we're far ahead with certain members members of congress and senators and others uh certain individuals are not there yet on the education front so with that would love to get kind of a high-level view of what you're seeing in dc yeah so um

i think something that is sometimes a challenge for those of us in this line of work but at the same time pretty beautiful about our system is that it's not a monolith right the federal government's certainly you know you take all the governments in the u.s they're they're not one thing and so you can't say that there's one view from dc about crypto um so you know you've got um the congress you've got the executive branch and you've got the courts and within the executive branch you've got dozens of agencies that each probably have some say uh related uh to crypto um and each of these um within each of these you have a multiplicity of

views um so there isn't one i would say so you know the way i would describe it is that within the agencies that are most implicated by crypto and are going to be doing you know that have already regulated or will be regulating um they tend to have pretty expert staff um focused on crypto and in general um it depends from agency to agency but um i would say that they have a very good understanding of cryptocurrency i think they find it typically they find it fascinating and there's enthusiasm for cryptocurrency at the same time they see the challenges that it poses for their missions um uh but you can have good

conversations with people who are expert at those agencies um and it depends it goes from agency to agency right so so it's a little different in congress i think what you have is um a small minority of members who have strong views about cryptocurrency either strongly positive or strongly negative and then a long tail of members who you know don't really have a view or have sort of a layperson's view where they've read about it and formed some inclination one way or the other but aren't don't really have a strong view and that's to be expected because you know of you know crypto is the world to us but it's just one of thousands of issues that members of congress face um and so

they can't be expected to have a strong you know a well-formed opinion about every issue that they have for them um and so part of the challenge for us there is educating folks as much as we can but with the understanding that we're never going to get every member of congress fully as immersed into crypto as we all are it's i'm doing some triage and making sure that the folks who are most negatively disposed um making sure that we have good counter balance counterbalance to those folks so anyhow i guess what i would say that you know there's no one um

perspective on crypto uh from dc but in if i could just sum it up in general look there is a lot of rhetoric that comes out of dc um because talk is cheap um and that tends to be negatives so often what you read in the press there's a lot of the folks who are not positively inclined towards crypto saying things that is negative rhetoric but if you look at the um the actions that the federal government has taken to date look um there's some stuff i find pretty objectionable starting once the infrastructure bill tax reporting provisions have just passed

um including to just generally tax policy some of what the sec has done but aside from that in general uh i would say that the us has gotten it right on um on crypto regulation right certainly vincent that treasury has cftc i think has i think in the main even the sec has jake and i might disagree on the margin um [Music] so i would say it's not monolithic and separate the rhetoric from what's actually happened um and so i'd say it's i'm very optimistic about you know the future of crypto vis-a-vis

regulation and i i of course we brought up the infrastructure bill already i feel like that's very critical to the conversation about the history of crypto regulation and jake i mean i know that you were all very integral uh in that process in dc jay could you give us a little bit of context around that and where we're at today in that fight yeah i know it's a big question i know it's i know that can be an hour-long response but yes and actually i think jerry had to record two podcasts just to cover the the story of the infrastructure bill so we'll try to keep it a little shorter than that um long story short uh the infrastructure bill was a promise of president biden's campaign um to you know build roads and bridges

and bring other bipartisan efforts forward and the only reason that crypto got tied up in this was in order to pay for all of the spending required by the infrastructure bill congress had to come up with pay for provisions that would raise as much money as the bill would would create a new spending and crypto was a target of uh of that effort uh there was a set of provisions that were designed which were not shared with industry or i think any of the stakeholders uh on our side until about a week before the infrastructure bill became public that was alleged to raise about 28 billion dollars i can't remember the exact figure in new tax revenue

and in short there were basically three major elements of these new tax provisions first the bill expanded the definition of a broker which is the category of market participants or actors who are required to do tax reporting in other words they have to file reports with the irs about transactions that they were a part of that they conducted on behalf of their customers the infrastructure bill expanded the definition of a broker to capture all sorts of participants in crypto that don't have access to the information they would need to do that kind of reporting um and you know non-intermediaries that

ordinarily would never be subject to requirements like this second it created a definition for the term digital asset which was wildly overbroad it essentially captured every type of asset that moves around on a blockchain whether it is monetary in nature or otherwise meaning in theory there could be a reporting required for almost any type of transaction that happened on a public blockchain and third the the infamous uh section 6050i provision the cash transaction reporting requirement which basically said that individuals and businesses who conduct transactions in trade or business

must file reports for any transaction worth more than ten thousand dollars so the example that that i know jerry has been giving for this is let's imagine you go to an antique store and you want to buy an antique desk and it costs eleven thousand dollars if you buy that with bitcoin or a stablecoin or some other digital asset well now the antique dealer has to file a report uh to the irs about that transaction so i mean for a lot of reasons we can get into but maybe to keep it a little bit shorter we won't these provisions just don't make any sense they don't match up with the nature of the technology that we are working with and they don't match up with the position that crypto market participants have in relation to these

types of transactions right miners who add blocks to a blockchain are very different from securities brokerages or banks or other brokers that are typically required to do this type of reporting we worked very very hard to try to fix this language in august unfortunately we did not succeed uh in sort of an odd turn of events where it seemed like all of the senators agreed that there should be an amendment to these provisions but because one senator couldn't get a different totally unrelated amendment that he wanted he decided if he couldn't get what he wanted no one could get what they wanted and as a result the infrastructure bill was passed and signed by president biden

with those original provisions included so we're now working very hard uh with the treasury department to try to mold the implementation of those tax provisions in a way that will make sense for the industry and that's sort of where i'll leave it for now thank you jake i know that's a hard thing to summarize and sarah um anyone i talked about the infrastructure bill and kind of what went on from advocacy perspective brings up fight for the future and the critical role you played and yet i don't know that very many people in crypto candidly are are as familiar with your organization or at least um as they would be with coin center the blockchain association so i'd love to hear from your side of the story as to i know you've been doing things

for a while at fight for the future related to blockchain but um how how the infrastructure build fight played out for you and the way in which you're interacting with these other organizations that we've been talking about and to the interacting with regulators and others too yeah sure um thinking about this a bit i mean the timing was terrible in terms of just the amount of notice we all had but good in in the way that we had already been working some on um you know specifically the fincen rules and um the proposed fad of rules and and had been you know working some with um coin center and blockchain association and so

we were already in pretty regular communication about what what might be coming next and we tested some different messages with our audiences and built sort of small audience of our own um around these issues as well you know for us being able to take on financial surveillance was just you know that that particular piece um around the fincen rules was was just you know we've been long focused on privacy and anti-surveillance um government surveillance but also you know corporate surveillance is as um you know technology evolves um but so when this you know this provision was added and we were you know alerted by folks at the blockchain association it you know it

was pretty easy for us to jump in um and it was also pretty easy for us to just to to be able to quickly be able to say that you know that no policy that impacts the future of the internet you know should be tacked on to some must piece must pass piece of legislation like like the infrastructure bill as jake set up as you know biden's president biden fulfilling his his campaign promises you know they have to be carefully debated and considered it's not the first time that we have fought a writer you know our last minute in addition to to a bill that um would affect would affect the future of the internet um and so you know whether people understand the issues or not they can

surely understand that that's just you know bad policy making so right out of the gates that was fairly easy for an easy message for us to to spread like this this makes no sense it needs to be fixed and then we were able to move quickly we um you know have a lot of customized tools that can easily connect a supporter to their member of congress or automatically submit letters through their members common submissions on their websites and we use use these tools all the time so they're they're battle tested um you know we specialize in sort of building quick campaign sites and tools that make the experience of what the goal is to make the experience of of taking action and doing activism easy so we were able to you know deploy one of these these tools in just a few hours um and you know we're able to to

switch it from focus on cinema senator cinema and mention as chief negotiators to okay this is really moving forward so we need to turn the switch and facilitate calls to all of our senators and we need to you know quickly focus on senator wyden's amendment because that that had been um thankfully introduced and so um you know we we are in a kind of ideologically small organization so that we can you know we're 12 12 staff people and so we you know are able to move quickly um and we really you know we live for these sort of big big viral moments we may talk a little bit more about sort of you know how the needle shifts on on issues like um technology and and and um

the internet but you know these these are the moments where we can have the biggest possible impact so as a small team we're you know we are good at dropping everything else and sort of working around the clock to take to take full advantage um and you know the outpouring of support from the community was massive you know with the help of of um coin center and um you know and folks like jake who are able to sort of spread the word on twitter it you know spread incredibly quickly and um we were able to sort of channel a lot of the energy in you know around the issue um towards congress and like i said at the outset you know over 40 000 calls very short period of time um you know when when the office is

closed for the week weekend we changed the site to add everybody's twitter handles and so folks were you know tweeting and i think over 20 20 million um uh you know sort of uh folks were able to see one of these tweets and so it really spread very quickly um and that was awesome so you know while we well we lost over the obscure senate rules and the senator from alabama it you know it felt like a pretty big victory uh for the community you know overall and this is something that we certainly hear a lot in the context of the infrastructure bill was the limited notice that anyone in the industry had um and so when we think about the next

you know fights in uh in dc and elsewhere in actual let's focus on dc like what are what are some of the things that the community should be aware of right now that might be the next infrastructure build fight that they can start working working towards today given that we have a little bit more time and i'm going to put this one to jerry first yeah so um it's interesting i think part of the reason why this became so focal is because it had to be a public fight because we got no notice right because this was done out of regular order and the same is true for the vincent fight that sarah mentioned that happened in december january of

uh or earlier this year one year ago i should say right um and the thing is when things are done through regular order that is um through an agency it is done through rulemaking or in congress a bill is a draft bill's discussed then introduced and hearings are done when things are done through regular order you know that's when i say we work behind the scenes that's what i mean i mean that we um you know when an agency is thinking about some regulation or some guidance we'll talk to them before there's a draft that's put out and we'll have conversations and back and forth and they'll you know we'll point out things hey did you think about this they'll be like oh yeah you're right we didn't think about this and that way we can improve things then it's

put out for public comments or introduces a bill and then we get to in the whole all the public gets to offer comments and um the agency has to take common and consider that and then that way things are improved and so by the time we get through this whole process usually we get a good result but once in a while for political reasons you will have folks at an agency like secretary mnuchin last year at treasury or this year mr portman with the uh infrastructure bill ran something through where it's got to get done this week and so it surprises everybody they give it to us fully baked we've had no input into it's first time we see it and so we can't have this back this conversation quote unquote behind the scenes which is

a nice conversation we have to have a public fight right and we need to at that point get everybody involved because what at that point the thing that they will understand is mass [Music] disapproval of what's being put out there um and so when you ask me what's the next thing i don't know because um usually when this happens it's a complete surprise to us um that said the kind of things that i would uh expect um are i i would say there are a couple of buckets one is um you know

at this moment we've got very good especially because we were able to push back and defeat um secretary mnuchin's um uh self-hosted wallet rules proposed self-help rules a year ago the rules around anti-money laundering today are perfectly reasonable and i was very happy to see very recently secretary yellen say that you know she's she's happy with the rules that we have in place now but at any moment there can be some black swan event some gas pipeline that gets ransomware that will cause something on a very high political level maybe the president say do something about this now and i don't care i don't want to hear

anything else right and so something like that could trigger something related to uh self-hosting cryptocurrency so i i worry about that um and then the other thing is related to d5 um it's no secret that there are investigations at the sec related to d5 those could result in enforcement actions if they do it's going to be very very interesting to see under what theory of law will those enforcement actions come um certainly one that i i hope won't come but might and one we have to be ready to engage in is if they make a case that

publishing code is in some way a violation of the securities okay and so i worry about that um uh so those are two things that i'm sort of on the lookout for right now okay and jake um i mean we hear like there is a decent amount of fun in the space i mean even as it relates to like the next thing that's going to come talk of enforcement actions etc that's what we hear about the community over and over again um and a lot of people want to do something about it they want to try to find a way to operate a business um where they don't feel insecure about what they're doing they

want to be compliant they want to be outside but they just don't know how to be and they're not people who've necessarily lobbied or advocated for anything in their life and you do a really good job of i think explaining for everyone what the meaning of some of the tea leaves in dc are what do you say when that average stakeholder be they you know an operator a founder a lawyer whatever comes to you or tweets at you and asks about how they can participate in the process um it's a tough question and i think especially in the context of enforcement actions you know unlike policy where i completely agree with jerry that you know this should be done well in advance stakeholders should be

brought in it should be discussed it should be thoughtful um you know people should be brought into into the conversation early and often the public should be able to weigh in uh enforcement is exactly the opposite enforcement by design should be kept confidential and the reason for that is because the mere fact of an investigation could suggest that there has been some wrongdoing but of course here in the u.s we have the presumption of innocence i mean typically that applies in the criminal context but it's true equally in the civil context we should assume that companies have not violated the law until and unless there is a finding that they have and so the rules of the securities and exchange commission and the other enforcement agencies in dc and around

the country in the states the rules are that these enforcement actions should and must be conducted confidentially just because the mere implication that there has been a violation can do more damage to the company than the violation itself if indeed there is one so it's really very hard for the public to get involved in any meaningful way on the enforcement side i think you know specific to crypto um a lot of the enforcement that folks are concerned may come i think stems from a misunderstanding on the part of of many enforcement lawyers and other policymakers about how the technology works so just as an example you hear chair gensler often talking

about defy protocols without understanding the difference between a decentralized set of smart contracts that run on a public blockchain autonomously and in a self-executing fashion as compared to a centralized institution that is offering some proprietary financial service that happens to use digital assets or blockchain technology in some way and so i think really the best that the public can do is uh to get involved in these advocacy and education efforts right to try to spread the word to try to get people to understand both how the technology works and also why they're interested in it you know i think going back to an earlier point um the reason that often the rhetoric in dc around

crypto is so negative is because policymakers think that it's an easy target to score political points and so it's not so much that they've thought through you know the policy or the issue or the reasoning behind the negative statement that they're going to make to the wall street journal or the new york times or some other media outlet that's giving them an opportunity to communicate with the public and get their name in print rather it's just because they think that there's very little cost to attacking the industry and i think what's changing now is policymakers are starting to understand their constituents care very deeply about this technology and about having access to the next generation of financial tools and also non-financial tools and so i think the more the public

speaks up about that uh the more they can influence sort of how how policy is going to work out in the end and uh sarah this one for you taking it back to previous battles the internet community has had um in dc thinking about things like potentially um the anti-soba campaigns net neutrality i'm sure a number of smaller campaigns that were run i know fight for the future has been involved in some of them um what um i think part of the reason is this question is that i think it's important that people in the community understand that this sort of campaign lobbying at times etc has happened several times as

it relates to you know new innovations and crypto is no exception to that what lessons would you draw from those those campaigns and how would you explain their importance to where we are now with those technologies i might have a visitor just you know at the exact right right moment um yeah i was thinking of this as jake was was talking as well because um yeah because [Music] because it is um you know it's acceptable it feels acceptable for for um you know for folks in congress to use the kind of rhetoric that they're using

right now because um although they are hearing more and more for from their their constituents and the infrastructure bill was a big breakthrough there but um yeah you know i think the i think it's so important that we do have the the inside game and the work that um coincidental is doing is so so critical for that we need to there needs to be the behind the scenes work there you know i always feel hopeful when i hear jerry talk about how there are really you know um smart folks who are educating themselves in the agencies and elsewhere and i'm sure there's there are more and more every day in you know amongst the the staffers in congress too but that we you know

if there's one thing i've learned from from 25 plus years of doing kind of political strategy and activism it's that when you're up against especially deeply entrenched powerful interest there's no way to just win with the with the facts and the persuasive arguments we need we need both um the folks in dc will listen and learn when you know what what they need to learn if we can successfully shift the focus off of some of the worst narratives for crypto outside of dc and begin to build more of a of a broad base of support um you know the folks in dc didn't really understand the internet or tech or net neutrality at the beginning and and frankly they didn't care enough um about getting more and more people online through broadband access but when we were able to frame the issue for the public as one of the cable companies

uh getting control of the internet you know turning it from the beautiful open mess that it wasn't to cable tv we started to see a difference in how folks were responding um when we were able to get these messages to every corner of the web through sort of the big big viral moments on the internet the sort of inflection points that we have things like the like the infrastructure bill and you know partnering with companies who had a stake in the outcome that could direct their users to take action organizing subreddit mods and all the things that we have done over the years we can channel a lot of that that outrage into political action um we need the inside game but we you know we also really need the outside work to help to shift the narrative over time and to kind of get the folks in in

dc to pay attention um so it's about those kind of critical inflection points making the most most of them and um you know really channeling a lot of that that energy into action at those big moments and and we've seen it time time and time again so we we we are optimistic that we can that we can we can do it again amazing well thank you so much everyone um and maybe we'll end it off with last question an optimistic question and a quick response uh but um thinking about you know if you're you're waking up in the morning whatever you go immediately on twitter of course because

we all do and then you see a tweet about uh a new regulation a new policy a new occurrence on the crypto regulatory front and it makes you as happy as possible it's the best possible thing for you to see what is that thing and maybe i'll start with with jake i'll go jerry and then go sarah yeah um i'll give you a real life example uh which is secretary yellen's statements recently uh about the fataf guidance so you know for quite a long time um before and then especially during this fight we had with secretary mnuchin last december i've always thought that the anti-money laundering laws are the biggest threats to a decentralized financial system they are the way that a government that wants to stop this technology in its tracks has

the most leverage to do so and especially with uh how the fat of draft guidance looked in march of this year um which basically was um designating almost every actor in crypto as a virtual asset service provider subject to know your customer regulations um that really sort of scared a lot of us uh and to see secretary yellen come out and say we're standing by our own guidance from may of 2019 which accurately captured how anti-money laundering laws apply to the sector i think that was frankly the best thing that we could have asked for to end this year i would love to see something similar next year uh from chair gensler or from the sec giving us some clarity on uh how

they interpret the howie test and its application to digital assets i think that would be the next thing that would make me extremely happy i am much less optimistic about actually seeing that but yeah that's that's my answer yeah and i'll say that you know that was a question for the record senator toomey asked um secretary ellen and i'm sure secretary ellen didn't actually write that answer herself folks who developed that answer is these smart people that treasury who get crypto right and who are developing that policy and so this is why i'm so optimistic that if we can get people really understanding the stuff and understanding where all of our interests are online we're going to get more of

those and so if i could wake up tomorrow and see a tweet that would make me happy it would come uh also from treasury but in this case from the irs or the office of tax policy um just with new guidance that makes sense uh the guidance that they put out in 2019 uh makes very very little sense it conflates an airdrop with a fork i mean really not good and so i think that's the area that needs most improvements um and so that that's where i would like to see you know better guidance well i'd start by you know seeing what jerry and jake have tweeted that morning

but um in it kind of totally totally different but i think the thing that would make me most happy would be to see aoc tweet something about something positive about decentralized tech um or retweet our our deputy director evan greer's tweet about about the importance of of um crypto to marginalized communities fighting repressive governments and we think that's possible um but i think that would you know we're fiercely nonpartisan but we do work with a lot of these offices on a lot of different issues and so we uh you know we did for the infrastructure bill and we will going forward continue to do outreach to them to try to break break through there but i think that would help to shift the political landscape i think

folks in you know like elizabeth senator warren would have would sort of have to reckon with that part of the party i think we could um you know we could give we could kind of give them a way to fit it into their their worldview that i think would make sense um i think with the midterms coming up and i think with you know clearly all the all that's coming out about um younger people you know adopting crypto and and and more and more people of color like i think the the big d democrats are gonna you know they're gonna see that this is important for them to get educated around and to um and to sort of see beyond some of the you know worst of the narratives out there um and to see how you know it could potentially be

revolutionary that would make me happy yeah me too all those things that make me happy so fingers crossed uh for 2022. but thank you all very much for taking the time to help us out as i think all of our listeners know by now um each of these organizations coin certified for the future and blockchain association ra and bitcoin round 12 as advocacy groups that need your support so thanks everyone i think we'll now add david and scott back into the room and you guys can feel free to just chill and turn off your videos we'll do a little debrief um but thanks so much thank you thank you david i think you're i think you're

muted sorry i have like 13 meet buttons uh welcome scott and myself back to the the panelists connor thank you for leading that that second panel um uh scott i want to ask you what were your thoughts on the last two panels that we just had on the show any anything you want to add absolutely amazing yeah i i liked a few particular points that like kind of i noted down actually the one that i think was particularly important even very early on was just like the yellowstone analogy because i really do think this is almost like a new landscape like a physical landscape that people are navigating you know in the metaverse i suppose as people call it that to me feels like you know there are these pitfalls there are are these risks but like it's a very exciting space that we need to like help people navigate once

people understand that space they can be much more comfortable with it and they can really actually enjoy what's there so that to me feels like a really powerful first piece and then with the infrastructure though i thought what was super interesting was like a lot of these conversations about or actually even just at the very end of the last panel like inflating an air drop with like a fork for example like that sort of thing is just like wild and it's that's to me the education that we really need to figure out is like how do you ensure that someone understands the terms that they're using in the context of these uh you know regulations and so like the proof of stake with the work concept uh in the regulatory uh rooting of the infrastructure bill is another one that really stands out but overall

yeah i thought the conversations were awesome like everyone involved just like is doing fantastic work and i hope that you know we can really get a lot of support to them in this round i definitely think the stories that people tell to really frame listeners heads are really really useful and the story that i want to put in listeners heads at the time is that um our industry is rooted before crypto it was rooted in cryptography and this this industry really began before bitcoin uh it started with the genesis of public private key cryptography and if you if you follow the story of the cypherpunks the the guys that really pioneered cryptography into the public domain they fought this fight too this is not the first time crypto has gone to bat

with regulators uh this is the first time cryptocurrency has but not cryptography uh and so this is this is not the first time we are doing this we're just doing it in a little bit of a different shape but let it be known when the cryptographers went toe to toe with bad regulation the cryptographers won however there is a lot more at stake here like i said in the beginning and in my panel and i'll say it again now the crypto industry is inherently about money and that is what we are calling the listeners and the viewers to do here today there again there is a link in the youtube description there is a link in the podcast show notes for you to go and check out the crypto advocacy funds for get coin round 12. this is becoming more and more uh important every single day

because we have the power to mint and create money in the world of cryptocurrency we should be able to direct that money towards the people that are advocating for positive informed and educated regulation uh that is happening in uh washington d.c and and abroad connor i want to hear your thoughts about your panel and as a and the event at large anything you want to add to the six fantastic panelists that we've had on the show today yeah i'm so appreciative that they all joined us because i learned a lot from each of them but i would say that a thing that's really critical too is our support of advocacy today is really important so that they continue to continue doing the great work that they're doing but something that uh to mike uh well actually a lot of tonight

kristin um sarah all brought up was around the need to also do so many other things right like engaging with certain communities that crypto has not engaged with so far helping policymakers and regulators understand that this is something this is an issue that affects their constituents and it affects a diverse range of people it's not just you know a singular kind of group that that participates in crypto and like sarah said like seeing aoc tweet about it and appreciate the value that it could have for financial inclusion um for privacy for like digital inclusion um that would be an amazing feat so today we're helping to

contribute to those advocacy groups but also appreciating that there are so many other branches and so many other approaches to this campaign like advocacy and law being is one building is another which kristen mentioned but there are also other sorts of grassroots campaigns we've heard a lot about like a crypto um a crypto nra equivalent that ryan selkis has mentioned we've heard about different types of organizations different research and advocacy orgs and i think that we should keep in mind that when you're thinking about what you can do to contribute to this space you can contribute in a lot of dynamic ways and so stay alive to them so i want to leave the viewers and the listeners with one last set of questions

from us three here so i'll ask it to you guys first what makes you optimistic that crypto can achieve the regulatory goals that we need to achieve in order to promote our industry uh scott let's start with you i think one of the things that we've learned from previous technological revolutions is that it's very difficult to stop technology i think the idea that you can just you know pause the internet or pause you know cryptocurrency is unfortunately for a lot of people that might want to like not really true and so the only alternative is really to engage actively with it and figure out what do you want this world to look like and how can this be something that's like you know actually beneficial for the you know communities that you serve and ultimately that to me is the place

that we're missing right now is that conversation about what does this look like you know within the context of your local communities within the context of your state or within your like country that to me is the the big piece that you know if we get people on the right track we can sort of like you know start to get people to sign off on that vision um and i think that you know the real power of cryptocurrency uh you mentioned money that's one piece of it but i really think it's about the ability to like have a kind of control over your destiny when it comes to the platforms being used the way that you you know use the internet at large and it actually goes back to web one the semantic web vision that tim burns we

originally put forward was based on this idea that we had like complete access and it was only in web 2 that you know that started being co-opted by like the facebook like which was like the only you know this digital part of the uh semantic web that we already had in web 2. so that like you know to me i'm very optimistic obviously about the technology feels like a very natural evolution of what the web was meant to be at the beginning and it feels like if we kind of help educate people about that we can really you know make it meaningful for the communities people are serving i'm optimistic about the fact that there are so many great groups who are just spending their entire day working on this problem and helping to educate pulse makers and regulators and we heard

that over again and again again right but that's the first stage and we appreciate that crypto is getting more champions because we all know that once you learn about its potential and you go down that rabbit hole it's really hard to pull yourself out or to stop appreciating all of its value so i'm optimistic and i'm also you know relatively confident that we will just get more and more champions as their staffers begin to get educated and help to educate those policy makers and regulators who are making some of these critical decisions i think what makes me optimistic is that uh just like what you said scott um standing in the way of technology generally doesn't work and i think it's even more and more clear people that bet against crypto tend to get absolutely

wrecked by crypto uh crypto has a fantastic way of humbling people that that oppose it at the end of the day however uh while that does give me some sort of faith that you know the crypto will emerge on the other side of these regulatory hurdles uh alive and successful it does matter whether these regulatory hurdles help shape crypto positively or help give it or actually put up walls and and give it friction uh i do believe no matter what crypto will manifest in its maximally successful form no matter what but it is really really important if does that happen in the year 2050 or does that happen in the year 2025 and those the 25 years of difference

between those two you know new results can have meaningful impacts upon many many people's lives and have significant downstream consequences as to you know just how good crypto can actually positively impact the world so while i am optimistic i still want to you know enter this regulatory hurdle thinking that everything can go wrong because you know things can go wrong and they can cost things can they can cost our industry dearly in the short term and can actually lead to muted positive benefits from the crypto industry over the long term so the window of opportunity that we have to direct crypto for good is here right now and we don't really know how big it is

so we should assume that's really really short scott connor thank you so much for helping me organize this event you guys have really uh championed this event and uh all i did was help show up and with the zoom and and the live stream so thank you so much for organizing this event uh any last words before we want to wrap this thing up i'll just say thank you i mean this has been amazing i think that if you want to get involved i have to say it you know go to get coin grants get point get coin.co slash grants and give a few dollars to the organizations that you care about um ultimately this fight is you know dependent on you yeah plus plus one to all that and and

thank you david and thank you to bankless actually as well because i feel like you guys spend a lot of time highlighting these issues and interviewing uh regulators and lawyers and others that the crypto community has not necessarily always traditionally been interested in so more of that cheers guys thank you everyone for tuning in thank you for for gitcoin and uh and for the dao research initiative for helping organize this event and of course thank you for our fantastic six uh fan uh spot uh not sponsors panelists that came and showed up on on today's panel again there is a link in the youtube description there is a link in the podcast show notes if you just donate one dollar that dollar can be matched by up to 10 50 sometimes a

hundred dollars of matching funds from the uh bitcoin matching pool this is how quadratic funding works your single donation is not only a donation of money but also a vote of where you think other people's money should go so your beliefs have outsized impacts as to the resulting uh funds that get directed towards all these advocacy events so as you are wrapping up this podcast the next thing that should be happening is you going on to get coin.co go towards the crypto matching uh fund page uh open up your meta mask open up your ledger close your checkbooks because this is a bankless funding initiative uh and get those get these crypto advocacy events funded uh thank you uh everyone for tuning in to this crypto advocacy panel cheers

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