Is the future of money at stake in the US midterms?

With some seminal regulatory legislation up for consideration, the makeup of Congress in 2023 matters not only to crypto natives but to everyone

With abortion, voting rights and other weighty issues top of mind, “normies” could perhaps be forgiven for dismissing as self-obsessive any crypto commentator’s claim that Tuesday’s midterm U.S. elections are monumentally important for how they’ll shape the regulation of blockchain technology and digital assets.

Regardless, that’s where I’m going with this. All of us – not just crypto natives – have a great deal at stake in how the next Congress enacts new crypto laws.

Of the five federal electoral cycles that this industry has now been through – I count the first as the 2014 midterms, which coincided with a debate spurred by the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) initial 2013 guidance on regulating “virtual currencies” – this one matters the most. That’s not just because crypto exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) developers and non-fungible token (NFT) platforms and issuers have their profitability riding on some key regulatory bills. It’s because they could define the future of money.

Whether we like it or not, money is going digital – truly digital, not Zelle- or Venmo-on-banking digital – which means the age-old system through which human beings generate, record and exchange value is about to undergo radical change. It’s vitally important for all of us that the laws that define how that change evolves are drafted and deliberated over in an open way so that, once enacted, they take humanity’s best interests into account.

So, with that lofty stage-setter out of the way, let’s look at two equally impactful bills under consideration.

Until a few months back, progress on both was generating hope that the crypto industry would this year enter a new age of regulatory clarity. In the end, political divisions over core issues, as well as the distractions of other priorities on Capitol Hill, pushed them beyond the post-election “lame duck” period to make them the next Congress’ responsibility.

That means that next week’s vote, which will determine who gets to define the leadership and makeup of the committees overseeing these bills, will indirectly shape their course – and, by extension, the future of money.

Source: CoinDesk/Michael J. Casey