The US-based Crypto Advocacy Group, the Blockchain Association, is campaigning for key figures in the Biden administration to advocate for more favorable regulations.
The association’s executive director Kristin Smith told Fox Business the group has already met or is planning meetings with senior Whitehouse officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, assistant secretary and former BlackRock executive Wally Adeyemo, and finance officials.
Citing reported comments from Yellen that the primary benefit of cryptocurrency was “illicit funding,” Smith said the association’s primary goal is to help the chief financial officer “understand the value of crypto networks”:
Our number one priority is helping Yellen understand that crypto goes beyond funding criminal companies. “
Yellen has been criticized by the crypto sector for calling Bitcoin “an extremely inefficient way of processing transactions” and speculating that BTC is “not widely used as a transaction mechanism”.
Despite her apparent hostility towards Bitcoin, Yellen has expressed her openness to centralized DLT. The secretary said a digital dollar could offer “faster, safer and cheaper payments” than the existing fiat currency last month.
Adam Traidman, CEO of Crypto Wallet BRD, stated that representatives of the crypto sector are “trying to work as high as possible in the food chain of the Treasury Department,” adding:
“We’re not against regulation and compliance, but we need time to innovate and lubricate the runners for adopting crypto first.”
Highlighting concerns about wallet and crypto-to-crypto transaction regulations, Traidman stated, “One of our primary goals is to get crypto-to-crypto transactions out of most regulations. If crypto transfers have to conform to the rules of wire transfer, it hurts the industry. “
Some members of the crypto community also expressed concern about Joe Biden’s nomination to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, who previously described Ethereum’s 2014 ICO as an unregistered securities offering.
Earlier this week, Gensler told the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC would work to ensure that crypto markets are “fraud and manipulation free” and accused offshore exchanges of being “fraudulent.”
Members of the Blockchain Association include crypto heavyweights Circle, Binance.US, Grayscale, and Kraken.
