It’s 2025, and fintech companies have their eyes on the future and are hoping for regulatory clarity.
“A lot of the major names in the digital asset industry are US-based companies—US-based companies that have been asking for regulation,” Ashley Scott, senior director of global policy and government affairs at Circle, a stablecoin platform, said at a CES panel focused on America’s fintech future on January 8 in Las Vegas.
“I think it’s a bit of an anomaly to find an industry in its infancy that has actively sought out lawmakers to be regulated,” Scott added.
“The reason why the industry has been asking for regulation needs to be said out loud. It’s just the basic idea that if you give us rules, we will follow them,” Robin Cook, Coinbase’s legislative counsel, added. “We are an industry that, at its core, is a group of computer programmers and builders. And if there are rules that can be coded into protocols, that can be coded into platforms, there are ways to make sure that compliance can happen.”
There’s an urgency to this regulation and compliance, according to Lindsay Fraser, a senior policy associate at Uniswap Labs. “If we continue to wait…more and more companies will move outside of the US, and so I think establishing that framework will prove that the US is committed to fostering a safe and predictable environment for digital asset development,” she said.
Purple issues. So, what do digital asset companies want to see from the 119th Congress? Bipartisan cooperation, for starters.
“Digital assets is a purple issue. We have to make sure, going into the next Congress, that digital assets and digital asset regulation isn’t seen as a Republican issue or a Democratic issue,” Scott said.
News built for finance pros
CFO Brew helps finance pros navigate their roles with insights into risk management, compliance, and strategy through our newsletter, virtual events, and digital guides.
Cook added that an emphasis on consumer protection “is the place to start” for building bipartisan consensus for fintech legislation.
“We can all agree that people should have a basic measure of protection when they’re transacting online,” he explained. “There also is, I think, a bipartisan desire to make sure that the US doesn’t get left behind in the process overall.”
Square pegs. Scott and Fraser also stressed the importance of building innovative legislation from the ground up, rather than trying to fit laws into the existing financial regulatory environment. “Force-fitting something that’s made for an entirely different system just does not work for an innovative technology,” Fraser noted.
All the while, Cook cautioned against ignoring the past.
“The idea, though, of trying to force old laws into a new framework doesn’t mean that you don’t need to look at the learnings from the old laws,” he added. “I do think that there is a lot of stuff that’s really familiar that can be applied to crypto in a way that achieves the objectives of the 1933 and ’34 Securities Acts. In particular, the idea of information asymmetry is the reason why we have securities laws in the first place.”
He continued later in the panel: “There’s just a lot of intellectual firepower that has already gone into analyzing a lot of these issues, and we know how to do this. It’s just not that hard. It just takes the political will to push it across the finish line.”