Last November, the American people clearly spoke. They support President Trump and the agenda in which he campaigned: a “golden age” in the United States. A key component of President Trump’s agenda is to take advantage of the leadership of the United States in advanced technology and economic strength for the benefit of all Americans.
Nowhere is this renewed approach to use our strengths for the most necessary future than in the development of digital assets and Blockchain operations, where Washington has been asleep at the wheel for too long.
According to surveys, 55% of US investors have Bitcoin, and more than 40 million have some type of cryptocurrency. Even our biggest financial institutions are now adopting digital assets and the transforming power of blockchain technology. There are little doubt that these innovations will make financial products more affordable and accessible. From the stable to the tokenization of assets, to decentralized financial applications, these advances have the potential to reduce costs and expand opportunities for both investors and consumers.
Despite its transformative potential and generalized adoption, the Biden-Harris administration refused to recognize the promise of this technology. The officials were not just indifferent – They were openly hostile. No matter how safe or innovative, the products associated with “crypt” or “digital assets” were blink and litigated in purgatory. Regulators refused to provide significant guide on how this technology could be implemented in a compatible way. Worse, they implemented new policies to make adoption even more difficult.
Today is a new day. There is a broad agreement that we need adequate regulation for the purpose that unlocks opportunities while providing the consumer and national security protections that Americans deserve. The world has us to ensure that global payment systems are not used for disastrous purposes, including terrorism financing and drug trafficking. Due to the abdication of responsibility of the Biden-Harris administration in the last four years, the United States has been left behind and others, including our adversaries, are developing products and systems that threaten the primacy of the dollar.
Despite the reluctance of the Biden-Harris administration, during the last congress, the Republicans of the House of Representatives led the position and approved historical legislation creating a regulatory framework with a vision of the future for digital assets. This bipartisan bill provides appropriate protections for consumers and proactively addresses national security and money laundering problems while ensuring the United States as a leader in digital assets and innovation in blockchain.
The Republicans of the Congress will now resume where we leave and work in a bicameral way with the administration and financial regulators of Trump to ensure that open hostility is eliminated from the executive branch of the last four years.
Congress has a unique opportunity to promulgate legislation that plays with US strengths. We will provide a base that will unleash innovation in digital assets and blockchain space, while solidifying the state of the US dollar such as the reserve currency and the preferred payment method by legal transactions worldwide.
As leaders of digital assets in the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee, our immediate priorities include establishing a federal framework with clear rules on Stablecoins, providing clarity for the initial sale and distribution of tokens, creating roads for the registration of centralized platforms for the Tokens trade, implementing strong protections against money laundering and terrorist financing, and guaranteeing fair competition.
We have already begun this work by recently publish our discussion draft to establish a framework for the issuance and operation of the payment stables called in dollars in the United States.
There are those who share the opinion of the Biden-Harris administration that the digital asset ecosystem is, in the words of the former president of the SEC, Gary Gensler, “full of Hucksters, scammers and scamming artists.” But that feeling only underlines the urgent need for these efforts. Effective legislation and proactive regulatory participation will ensure that good actors with innovative products can prosper in the US. And consumers are properly protected from carpet strip, market handling and other fraudulent activities.
We are world leaders in finance and technology because, throughout our history, we have expected and adopted innovation as a means to reduce costs, increase opportunities and improve protections. We need to be faithful to our history and do it again.
With our newly formed bicameral working group for digital assets, we will work on the wall with the president of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, the president of the Senate Agriculture, John Boozman, the president of the agriculture of the House of Representatives, GT Thompson, and the cryptographic of the White House, Tsar David, to advance the legislation offered on the envelopes we made to the American people. The “golden age” of digital assets in the United States begins now.
