Our market seeks to reinvent many of the most important and regulated functions of our society. Due to that aspiration, no other market of similar size and age has actually so rapidly caught the focus of policymakers and regulators.
This attention develops unique obstacles and chances. Policies enacted in the coming years related to securities laws, anti-money laundering and know-your-customer requirements, market stability and taxes might smother our nascent market, or they could lay the structure for a growing and vibrant cryptocurrency and blockchain economy.
Kristin Smith is the executive director of the Blockchain Association, which commemorates its 2- year anniversary today.
For instance, the Financial Action Job Force, a global monetary monitoring standards-setting body, has signaled that a few of its members might be looking for to restrict peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions and making use of un-hosted wallets. Eliminating or restricting people ability to transact directly with one another would undermine the essential innovation of cryptocurrencies and turn them, in essence, into yet another speculative possession class.
On the other hand, legislation in the U.S. Congress such as the bipartisan Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act, which would excuse from a specific’s gross income any gain arising from a personal deal utilizing virtual currencies so long as the gain is less than $200, would remove a significant barrier to the larger adoption of cryptocurrencies.
Our team at The Blockchain Association works to make sure that legislators and regulators see the industry for what it truly is: the future. And given that we established 2 years earlier, there have been a number of favorable regulative advancements for our market.
They consist of the bipartisan Token Taxonomy Act, which would exempt specific digital tokens from U.S. securities laws; Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce’s Safe Harbor proposal would exclude certain tokens from the definition of a security under U.S. law for 3 years; and the Workplace of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) recent interpretive letter, which breaks the ice for national banks to provide custody services for cryptographic possessions and eliminates ambiguity inhibiting wider institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based services.