Everyone's Favorite Policy Panel

Transcript

It's great to see you all here today. Um, and Phil did mention, and I I just want to thank both Phil and Jake for setting up this panel for us today. Um, Phil mentioned that they entitled this everybody's favorite policy panel. I don't know if that's true for everyone in the crowd, but it is certainly true for me, and that's for two reasons. The first one is I get to sit on a panel and moderate a panel with these enormously talented policy experts and some lawyers. Um uh and we have had sort of an ongoing conversation about these issues for the last few years both at the last ETH Boston and the one before that and the last Salana conference. So uh it's exciting to get back together

again. Uh but really it's because of the crowd. Uh this is one of the few uh uh uh events uh that policy people get to talk to builders and founders uh people out there in the trenches who are actually trying to make things and find product market fit and and create something delightful for people. So uh we're not just talking to fellow lawyers, we're talking to you and that's what makes it at least my favorite policy panel. Um and what a great crowd we have uh up here on stage. I'm going to let them each introduce themselves in one moment, but just to to set the stage, um, if you had been in the crowd at any one of those events that I had mentioned before, um, you would have

been hearing us talking about should American builders go overseas, when is Congress going to act, will they ever act? you know, what can we do to bring down uh not just the risk of uh regulatory investigations but of prosecution in some cases. This is the first time that you will see this group up on stage smiling. Uh and we're going to talk about some of the reasons why. Now, three of four three of the four of us are lawyers, so we're not going to be like unreservedly joyous. There are still things that we're worried about, and we're going to talk about that, too. But um let me uh uh let this enormously talented panel

introduce themselves. Starting with Mari. >> Hey, my name is Mari Tun and I'm a general counsel at Double Zero, which is building a private version of the internet that is faster if validators want to validate blocks faster. I also teach blockchain and crypto law at Boston College Law School, training future lawyers. >> Hi everyone, it's great to be with you. My name is Mark Seiance, partner at Israel David LLC and board member and secretary at the Boston Blockchain Association. I focus on highstakes commercial litigation, cryptocurrency related litigation and strategic counseling and advice for blockchain related companies and investors.

>> Hi everyone. Uh Chris Leman, founder co-founder and uh head of policy and research at Groma. Groma is building a real estatebacked token. Uh we've got a lot of exciting stuff going on this year, but core proposition is real estate coin, stable coin for real estate. >> Thanks everybody. And I'm Gus Coldabella. I was um many years ago the general counsel of uh uh Homeland Security in the Bush administration. I then took a weird turn into crypto where I worked with a lot of the people in the crowd when I was the chief legal officer at Circle. Uh I was in the general counsel of Paradigm. Uh and now I'm a partner at uh a venture capital fund, very early stage venture capital fund based in PaloAlto, California called True Ventures. Um and what I like to do

and what everybody on stage likes to do is help founders figure out the thorniest um legal and regulatory issues and there's no better place to do that than in crypto. Um let's start with I mean we had talked about talking about the law and we're going to do that in a minute but I want to talk about a vibe check first. I mean, what is what is everybody feeling after the first six months of an administration that seems and I think objectively is much more receptive to crypto? What is exciting to you Marty?

>> Well, I can start. What has excited me for the last 10 minutes is that crypto has really hit retail. Jake's mom is here in this audience which means that uh something has something that pierced a uh what is really exciting about the new administration is that we have a different shift not only in prosecution and enforcement but in the way we approach this industry. We want to see it succeed. When we talk to regulators, they're trying to find ways to help developers move forward and launch instead of being quiet or or trying to find uh mistakes or vulnerabilities in their strategy. And I think we'll go into the details of what has been passed later, but that's what gets excited me that the mind shift in the eyes of

regulators. >> Go ahead, Mark. Yeah, I largely agree. And a good example of the mentality within the current administration that's seeking to come alongside and collaborate with the industry is the Securities and Exchange Commission's crypto task force and some of the guidance that has emanated from that task force. And it's not being created in a vacuum. We'll probably get into more detail later, but the crypto task force force is out there meeting with industry regularly. I had the pleasure of meeting with them a few months ago over an informal dinner and that's just emblematic of the mindset shift that less than a year has brought forward.

>> Yeah, 100% agreed. Um you know under the previous administration the the SEC was seen internally uh by Chroma as a big risk and you know we we worked with them and we had productive conversations but it was constantly dancing on eggshells and being maximally conservative. Um but now it's very different right it's there's a mutual recognition that there are a lot of genuine theoretical questions for which the answers are not obvious uh to the world broadly and the SEC seems genuinely interested both academically and as a matter of doing what's best for investors for innovators etc in figuring out what the best answers to those questions are and it's um very exciting to you know be on the ground floor and and trying to figure

out what framework works and what regulations, legislation, etc. are going to be the correct ways to resolve those questions. >> Excellent. Uh why don't we start right there? I mean, I think the way that we think about uh the players in the US government uh are, you know, obviously things get resolved in the courts, but we have the administration, the executive branch, and we have Congress, the legislative branch. And um previously we had a Congress that wasn't doing anything and an executive branch that was really actively against at least as instantiated by the SEC uh crypto moving forward, being able to register, do the things that it needed to do to uh effectively carry on business uh and innovate in the United States. Um over the past few months,

we've had a signing ceremony in the White House for the first crypto bill uh that was passed by the US Congress. Uh Mari, will you take us through uh the Genius Act and what it means? >> The Genius Act. So stable coins um even during the prior administration, stable coins have always been legal. It has been possible to issue stable coins as some people at Circle know. But it was very complicated and cumbersome to have a license. It's maybe in go through each state. Do I need a money transmission license here? And now what the Genius Act does is that you can have um a one single federal regulator that will give you license to issue stable coins in the

US or at the state level but it will give you the license um license holders a clear framework what do you have to do monthly at the stations of course 100% backed by uh whatever the reserve asset is but it actually means more than that. So that's the technical part of lawyers advising how do you issue stable coins. It's now easier but the significance to the entire industry is actually larger than that. Now also other financial institutions think like major banks can look at crypto industry and see this as like a stamp of approval from the highest level of our government. Crypto is no longer anymore only for money laundering or drugs but is actually something that is regulated and you can build businesses and

business models on top of stable coins. So this is just the start for other innovation to um build on top of stable coins and crypto and there will be will be another uh act right >> absolutely yeah >> uh anything to add on genius >> for me I think the big impact to the industry is the ability for new entrance to get into the stable coin market and that's startup startups, but it's also legacy players like Walmart and Amazon and other large retailers that previously may have not had a clear path

forward for developing a proprietary stable coin for users within those retail environments and now that path is clearly available. Also, I think we'll see something of a massive proliferation of an abundance of different stable coins over the next couple years in the United States. And then as in many of these scenarios, some amount of consolidation and constriction as either the user base or other factors cause some of them to fall by the wayside, but the end result will be an appropriate diversified menu of stable coins that can be used at all levels of

industry. >> Can I ask a question? So, Tether today announced that they're going to launch another stable coin. Why do we need more than one stable coin? Well, I guess I set that up. So, the part of the part of the reason it excites me is it allows for users who want to optimize their power, their purchasing power, their spending power within a particularized environment to do so. So, maybe if you're using, let's just stick with the Walmart example. I love Walmart. If you have a Walmart stable coin, maybe there are discounts or premium values or other incentives associated with your purchasing power at Walmart that you want to use within that environment and you're not as big a fan

as Target and so you're not going to invest your fiat into the Target stable coin. So I think it's a function of customization primarily. >> Yeah. >> Oh, go ahead. >> Oh, yeah. And and just one last, you know, top level point there. Money should be competitive, right? There are all kinds of reasons why someone might choose one credit card over another credit card. The same thing should happen with currency, right? We have the dollar today, which is extremely standardized, but having stable coins that provide the ability for, as you said, optimization around the edges is great for, you know, anybody who cares about the utility of currency. The two quick takeaways for me, one in response to Marty's question is uh this is how the US market should work, which is we're allowing innovators to innovate

and to figure out the elements of the product that is in this case stable coins that they're bringing to market that will uh hopefully delight consumers, but some as Mark said will fall by the wayside. We're going to figure out what is necessary using a market approach rather than a top- down regular regulatory approach ex with the exception of you know the essential consumer protection elements of genius which are which are about what uh kinds of uh securities and other instruments are are to back the stable coin. So that's the first thing and the second quick thing is uh Mari mentioned banks and uh as did Mark getting into this and we have gone in the span of a year to 18 months from banks debanking people who interacted with crypto to banks now

struggling to be stable coin issuers and there are a lot of dynamics at play there but I think it's it's just worth noting that um uh you know we we have a now a 10-year-old saying maybe longer than that in crypto that We're still early, but that shows that we're still very, very early. >> One last thing to add on Genius. So, I think if we're looking back at the biggest debacle in stablecoin history, it was the Terral Luna fiasco. And Genius very helpfully prevents that from ever happening again. at least exactly that from ever happening again because it requires full backing of stable coins and prevents the rolling out of

algorithmic stable coins that aren't fully backed. So the the two main uh pieces of legislation that were moving through Congress sort of simultaneously were Genius, which we've talked about, and a market structure bill. It was first known in the House as Fit 21 and the House did pass Fit 21 and then the next Congress came in and uh uh tweaked it, made it better, passed it as something called the Clarity Act. Now, the Senate is considering uh its version of the market structure bill. And Chris, why don't you take take us through what's in it, what a market structure bill is, and uh when we might see something out of that process.

>> Yeah, great question. So, um two two market structure bills, right? clarity under the House which has passed the House and the RFIA for the Senate which is still in a draft state right it's not even formally uh under consideration for voting yet um Democrats have uh some notes on broad principles Republicans have issued a draft um I think it's probably useful to start first off what was in the clarity act uh and what is different in the RFIA um clarity act was you I guess core understanding of what a market structure ffstruure bill is it's delineating authority for regulating digital assets between the SEC and the CFTC and creating criteria that enable people to confidently determine for you

know a given digital asset token what what it's going to be considered will it be considered a digital asset security will it be considered a digital commodity or a stable coin in the case of the the Genius Act uh the Clarity Act focused heavily on decentralization as the criterion for determining whether something's a commodity or a security. the more centralized the um ownership and control and rule making of a given token is the more likely it is to be considered a security right so if you have say I think it's over 20% of it controlled by a you know single team um if you have uh significant discretion over who's allowed to participate and at

what stage these are all things that push it under the house's bill to be more of a security there's a bit of a grace period early on as these tokens are necessarily going to be fairly centralized at the beginning, but after that grace period has expired. If you're not sufficiently decentralized, you're you're likely to be issuing a security. Uh otherwise, you can be considered a commodity, right? Once you've hit that level of decentralization, commodity is the label. Um and notably, the Clarity Act doesn't focus as much on the economics of the tokens, right? So the fact that a token might uh produce yield or might have you know explicit financial elements to it because those explicit financial elements expectation

of profit are not under the control of a a centralized operation they don't trigger the howy test they they they aren't putting themselves into categorization as securities. Contrast this with the Senate bill uh Senate draft bill RFIA which does not focus on decentralization and instead focuses on economics. So uh RFIA will consider you a security if you are paying out dividends or if there is an explicit ownership stake explicit financialization. um it's it's less concerned about whether the value of the token is a property of of network effects and is more looking at the explicit economic promises associated

with the token. Um and decentralization doesn't enter into into it as much. Now that could change, right? You know, regardless of what ends up happening with RFIA, whatever the Senate does will have to be reconciled with what the House has already passed and we'll see what that looks like. And so that brings me to timeline. As Gus mentioned, u the there are two relevant committees here. There's the Senate Banking Committee, which governs the the SEC and securities regulation, and there's the Senate Agricultural Committee, which has jurisdiction over commodities. Uh and they each have their own separate versions. Um it's predicted loosely but maybe not reliably uh that ideally the banking committee will have finished its debate on on its draft by the end of

September. Uh I think they were looking at agriculture by end of October, reconciliation in November and then potentially to the president's desk by December. Now the these are I believe that it was mostly the the timeline that senator Lumis outlined and so that may be somewhat optimistic. There were some predictions made about the timeline back in Q2 that ended up being overly optimistic. So, we'll see. You know, there's no guarantee that we will get any market structure bill passed into law in 2025. And then the question of whether we get anything in 2026 is really uncertain, right? Congress has limited time. They've spent a lot of time this year on the Genius Act earlier on on the market structure bills now and it's possible that they'll have other

things on their plate next year. Um but the good news there is even if Congress doesn't create legislative clarity on market structure, the SEC has very clearly signaled that it's going to be engaging in rulemaking. Right? You know, ideally the rulem will happen with guidance from Congress, but if there's no such guidance, the SEC has lots of ideas already about what that rule making is going to entail. um and and fortunately again bringing in a lot of people from the industry uh to provide comment and collaboration on that rulemaking process which will unfold over the course of several months.

>> And interestingly the chairman of the SEC said two weeks ago that decentralization is no longer part of the legal test that they use when they look at tokens. He also said that most tokens are not securities. So someone could ask do we do we need the Congress to pass anything since the SEC is this actively speaking publicly tokens are not securities decentralization is not part of the test. So um even if it's not passed I'm optimistic that there will be clear ways for token issuers to operate and launch in the US um under the SEC's current SEC's leadership. I think the key phrase is what you ended with, the current SEC's leadership. And so I think

that possibility that in a few more years we could have a different administration which brings in a different SEC and we have this seessaw effect going back and forth between potentially unfavorability towards the industry then favorability and then again unfavorability. I think that dynamic underscores why there really is some urgency around passing either clarity or the Senate version of that bill because in the absence of something that's locked in at a congressional level, the SEC guidance, whether it be formal or informal, can be fairly easily rolled back by a new administration should that be their desire. So, I don't

think we're out of the woods. we're in a good zone, but there's further work to be done for sure. >> Yeah. I think the point that each of you made is is important to underscore which is the SEC could have always created a line through regulation or guidance or otherwise that said okay this type of crypto token is something that we're not going to regulate as a security or if you do these things that are a lighter touch sort of regulation uh you'll be within our regulatory sandbox. uh Commissioner Hester Pur who has been on the SEC for quite some time and was a staffer to the current chairman Paul Atkins when he was a commissioner on the SEC. So she's been around the block a

heck of a lot has um for years now had uh sandbox and other regulatory proposals that would allow innovators to innovate without running a foul of the securities laws. But as everyone in this room and everyone in the industry who has been paying attention knows that was not the approach as Mark said of the last administration and the SEC chairman in the last administration Gary Gendler. Um instead uh the the idea was we are going to this is the SEC use essentially all of our enforcement powers and our regulatory powers to try to stop the crypto industry from taking root in the United States. And that has uh resulted

in that did result in a lot of regulatory distortions that I hope we have a chance to talk about in a few minutes. But I would like to spend uh a a a celebratory few minutes with Mari and everyone talking about what we're seeing out of this SEC uh pre-Adkins, post Atkins, uh with the crypto task force and the various other initiatives that they're following. >> Yeah. So pre-Akins we saw from the news the SEC suing Coinbase. Now Binance now the next token issuer. And with this SEC, they started in January saying meme coins not securities. Stable coins not securities. Proof of work activities securities laws not there. SEC not

there. Proof of uh stake not securities. Liquid staking, staking pools, delegated staking, all outside the SEC's jurisdiction. Um OC saying banks can custody crypto. Uh what else the SEC says recently? I think the liquid staking one was was the latest. Uh I think the big framework for what is inside the SEC's jurisdiction when it comes to crypto, what fundraising activities uh with respect to token sales are regulated by the SEC. That is still unknown. We don't know yet. So that is hopefully coming by the end of the year. I hope the SEC doesn't wait until Congress decides whether or not

they're going to pass. uh but the SEC should take steps to uh now they have gone around the country meeting people uh like Mark and now it's time for them to start issuing no action letters and affirmative guidance of how to move forward. >> Yeah. And I think I think it's worth noting that um this isn't the SEC working on its own though the SEC could work on its own. There's also um a report that uh the White House convened essentially all of the regulators who have any part in touching crypto u and gave them I don't know three months uh to come up with a you know America leading in digital assets uh report and that report is worth a read. It's not long, uh, but it lays out a really nice

blueprint including what the SEC is doing, but beyond what the SEC is doing for how this administration is trying to supercharge crypto in the United States. >> Yeah. And just jumping off that, another differentiator between this time this year and this time last year is we are seeing a greater degree of inter agency coordination. I remember last year, especially between the CFTC and the SEC, you would have almost these wrap battles of letters going back and forth between the commissioners and the other personnel within those two respective agencies where they were taking issue with each other's approaches. And we're

seeing quite the opposite this year. Just in the last week or so, the SEC and the CFTC have on two occasions issued joint reports, joint recommendations, and part of the messaging is we're going to work on this together. There's also details in terms of what these spec specific initiatives are, but the headline point is we want to work on this together so that the industry isn't faced with uncertainty and misdirection coming from two different portions within the government.

>> Yeah. And from from our perspective, you know, as we have a token ourselves that is unquestionably a security, right? Growacoin is a reach share onchain. reach shares are securities. Tokenized REST shares are therefore securities. There's never been any uncertainty around that and that's something we were very forthright about with the Gendler SEC and are continuing to be forthright about with the the Atkins SEC. Um but where there is some ambiguity uh and where we've found um the the conversation to be very fruitful um is around the question of okay, securities are one thing. What constitutes a securities exchange? Um and that's another question that I think there's been less discourse about uh at least for the general public though obviously there are many entities that are very concerned with that question. Um but you

know to the degree that people are trading in securities and maybe trading in securities on chain maybe even doing so in a decentralized um context. which trip lines are the relevant ones for causing that kind of system to become a securities exchange as opposed to just an exchange that happens to involve securities. Um there's a lot of really interesting unresolved questions that um were at the the center of the dispute between unis swap and the SEC that started in 2024 under Gendler and was ended almost immediately after uh the the new uh chair Atkins came in in February of this year. Um but even though the enforcement was over, those

questions are still open. Um what status does KYC AML impart upon an exchange? Is that controlling access in a way that causes it to be a securities exchange because somebody's setting rules? Um what kind of fees can either a protocol charge or can a pool creator charge? Um you know, what does it mean to bring together buyers and sellers of securities, which is one of the the core tests? um is a liquidity provider uh having you know effectively a a standing limit order or is it something else entirely and and what do liquidity ranges mean for that? Um I don't know the answers to those questions. I can say, you know, the polarity of different things and, you know, whether they move

it farther or closer to being a securities exchange, but um the fact that the SEC genuinely seems eager to figure out the answers to those questions in a way that is um not a gotcha and that provides as much value as possible while maintaining protections for people is uh very encouraging. >> Chris, I'm I'm glad you raised all of those points because it mean, you know, two takeaways for me. One is it is not the end of crypto policy history. There's still a lot to work on. Um uh we're doing so in a much more favorable environment, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. And the second thing is if you uh if you heard the chairman's initial speech on crypto, I

went from thinking that maybe we were as an industry asking for too much to thinking that we were asking for too little. Paul Atkins gave the speech and he said all markets should be onchain. That's going from, hey, you know, we're cryptobuilders. We want to be safe in building in the United States. We want to make sure that we're able to self-custody uh and do the the sort of the list of things that we think are important to do. And the new chairman of the SEC uh is saying, "Hey, we like what you built.

I want to use it for everything." And therefore it's very important uh for us uh as a community with our regulators to be focused on the questions that you just raised and others. Um Mari mentioned uh a lot of the lawsuits from the the pre uh Atkins days and uh Mark I know that uh all eyes were on the Roman Storm prosecution in the Southern District of New York. Uh, I'm sure a lot of people on everyone on stage and a lot of people in the crowd are still concerned about how builders are going to be treated under the the criminal laws of the United States. Are they money transmitters? Is there potential

liability like we saw for tornado cash? And um and you know beyond that, what's the enforcement outlook uh for the next you know two, three, six months? So starting with tornado cache, there's a disparity in terms of how the organization, the entity was treated and how the developer was treated. So and the entity really just being the programmable uh immutable code. So back in 2024, month of November, the federal appellet court concluded that the OFAC, the OFAC list had impermissibly

restricted Tornado Cash and considered tornado cashe a sanctioned entity or a sanctioned program. The federal appellet court said there's no basis to do that. and the tornado cache program was again whitelisted on the OFAC list. So it was permissible to interact with and there was no liability for interacting with the program. So you would think all right we now have as a matter of civil liability a federal appellet court saying no harm no foul.

You would think that at given that precedent, the criminal enforcers would say, "Okay, well then the person that created the program isn't liable for anything because the program itself is nonproatic." And again, we've seen all these other indicators that the administration wants to be less scrutinizing and less harsh towards the industry. Well, as we all know, that didn't happen in the case of the criminal prosecution of Roman Storm. The DOJ under the administr the new administration continued the prosecution all the way to a trial that culminated last month. And although Mr. Storm was acquitted on the uh money laundering charges and the sanctions avoidance

charges. He was convicted on the supposedly apparently criminal charge of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money services business. And so he's awaiting his sentencing. He will most certainly appeal. And he is in the meantime not incarcerated. but he still has this significant overhang of a criminal conviction and a pending criminal sentence. And I think it's a wake-up call to the industry more broadly that part of this disconnect within the government that I just talked about was a significant factor under the prior administration. We're still living with some of that under the new

administration. and maybe there was some uh difference to the prior criminal authorities that had instituted the charge and so the administration just said we're going to keep going with this. We haven't seen a number of parallel cases being brought by the new administration as as opposed to being closed out from the prior administration. But it's still a significant overhang. And it also highlights that the criminal authorities are not the only source of liability for developers. Private litigators, private parties can bring suit against developers on a whole range of issues.

And none of those litigators and none of those parties are dropping their initiative to sue large and small participants in the industry just because the government's view may have shifted. So private litigation against the industry remains a significant concern. >> Yeah, I I think that's that's well said. Uh and one of the things about the storm prosecution that I think got under the skin of a lot of people who think about these things is that for years um the uh uh Fininsen office at at the department of treasury in the federal government the financial crimes uh unit of treasury said hey you know what unless you're

custodying funds you are not a money services business uh the DOJ in the Roman storm prosecution took a totally different tack and said we understand you're not custodying funds, but we're going to prosecute you under this law called section 1960 that says you should have registered as a as a money services business. And that's exactly the one charge out of the ones that Mark uh described that he was found guilty of. It's probably good for him for an appeal, uh, honestly. And it really shines a light on a lot of the work that our industry groups are doing with Congress. One of the bills that uh that we talked about before, I think it's the Senate version of the market structure

bill, at least in the last draft that I saw, had a provision that would clarify that section 1960, which is what he was prosecuted under, should not be used against people who are designing and issuing software on chain. Um, let's talk about uh let's talk about the open questions. We talked Chris, you talked about a few uh earlier about what's a securities exchange, but there are a heck of a lot of open questions um uh that I think we could be working with this administration to uh to resolve and that builders are are very interested in. So, I'll open it up to the whole group. What

are you thinking are the the things that are still causing some apprehension amongst uh amongst folks who are building in crypto and how should we prioritize them uh to solve those problems? >> Yeah. Uh so I guess one that's become salient again in the past week or two um is the the issue of stable coin yield. So uh the the Genius Act, the stable coin bill from July um prohibited stable coin yield. Uh but the the industry is trying to take the position that there are lots of ways to reward holders of stable coins that don't constitute yield, right? Financial rewards could be considered a marketing expense, for instance. Uh and so that is something

that is uh an open question and that um the the banking lobby notably is is trying to insert additional clarity into the Senate version of the market structure bill to make it a more broad uh and less evadable prohibition on all kinds of of monetary compensation for stable coin holders. Uh so so that's one that um you know is definitely going to be contentious as we see that bill move forward through committees. As I think about what's still open, obviously we've talked about the fact that we still don't have a market structure bill. And although the SEC has come down with its perspective on what constitutes a security and what doesn't, one thing that the elimination or the

failure to continue many of the cases that the SEC had brought against many of the businesses in the industry, one one factor that's generated by that development is now courts are not going to weigh in and fill that void that continues to exist within the governance structure around what is a security, what is not a security in the crypto space. And we had seen some courts start to address that question and actually a number of courts had gotten it fairly right on that question. But with the elimination or the non-persistence of many of the cases that the SEC had brought, which is of course overall a good thing. One negative byproduct of

that is we're not seeing those courts then further shape the landscape in terms of what's a security and what isn't. And so again that question until Congress answers it is now going to be answered by courts but courts hearing arguments from private litigants as opposed to hearing arguments from government positions. So, it's going to continue to maintain a level of uncertainty and a level of confusion unless and until the clarity act or another market structure bill goes through. So, one thing that excites me and one that worries exciting is are are the super apps that chair Atkins talks about. So, a platform where you can trade both tokens that are not

securities tokens and equity. So, think like NASDAQ marrying with Coinbase or actually NASDAQ just invested in Gemini. So maybe I should say them uh getting married. Um the other thing that one thing that worries me is let's say crypto is not regulated by the SEC. It's a commodity now under CFTC jurisdiction. Much smaller agency, less funds, less people, and there's still this problem of market manipulation and insider trading. Do we have or do they have what they need to fix that or protect token holders? or do we need to fund them a little bit more or do they does do we have to change anything or do we have already now what's needed to fix that?

>> Two quick ones from me. I think the the first one is one of the regulatory distortions of the US being so hostile is that we saw a lot of offshore structures for uh crypto entities, you know, with a foundation issuing tokens and a you know, you know, various island nations in the Caribbean making a lot of revenue because of uh US businesses uh organizing there. uh yet to be seen, but I think there are a lot of really interesting regulator regulatory developments around the United States that combined with the federal tailwinds that we just described will have uh more simple organization for token issuing and crypto uh businesses within this country. Uh which is uh which is I think

great news. Um we're running out of time so I'm going to ask a quick final question. The crowd listening to us might think that everything's great, but I think Mark, you described that we we have a, you know, a limited time to secure our gains here. What should uh people who are interested in making sure that crypto policy does not shift with the political winds be thinking about doing uh right now to the whole panel? But go ahead, Mark.

I think of the significant emphasis that the industry was focusing on in terms of interfacing with government positions, government candidates, supporting uh candidates based on their positions visav the industry and we shouldn't be taking our foot off the gas on that. We saw the impact of that in the last goround and we may have a tendency to get complacent and think oh that can't that that'll never go away. It could very easily go away. So I think keep the foot on the gas of the grassroots advocacy the grassroots uh positioning with the government with the candidates

because that's the only way to keep things on our side. >> Yeah. And I guess looking at Congress, uh, you know, the Genius Act passed with 78 Democratic votes and almost every, I think, Republican vote. And that was a great show of bipartisanship. But 78 is a lot less than the roughly 200 Democrats that are in the House right now. Uh, in Massachusetts, for instance, I think every senator and all but maybe two of the the reps voted against um the the Genius Act, or, you know, would if it were to get there in the Senate. and the the voice of individual voters um you know whether you're in the industry as a participant or not makes a big

difference there. Uh and you know to the degree that you live in Massachusetts which probably many of you do communicating to your rep um specifically the Senate may be a lost cause is a a pretty meaningful thing to do. >> Operate in good faith. Don't be the bad guy so that the regulators or the legislators have an easier job in passing favorable uh regulations legislation. Please join me in thanking our panel uh for their insights and thank you to the Boston DA and ETH Boston for having us here today. And thanks to all of you for being here. We appreciate it.

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