White House Executive Order Starts Wheels Turning on Cryptocurrency Policy
President Biden is not about to take his salary in Bitcoin, and NASA does not seem ready to underwrite its return to the Moon by selling NFTs, but the Biden administration has officially put cryptocurrency policy on its to-do list.
The White House today released an executive order on "Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets," which sets out policy priorities for digital currencies—including the possibility of the US issuing one backed by the Federal Reserve—and directs an array of government agencies to start researching ways to achieve those goals.
This document, which runs 5,000-plus words, notes that “non-state issued digital assets”—meaning Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies–have grown in value from $14 billion in November 2016 to $3 trillion as of last November but have also raised serious concerns along the way.
Most of its policy objectives focus on reducing those potential harms: privacy violations, fraud, and theft hurting individual customers, investors, and businesses; cryptocurrency-induced systemic instability upending US and global financial markets; money laundering, ransomware payments and evading sanctions such as those now hitting Russia’s economy; and the environmental impact of the computational work needed to sustain a digital currency.
The document instructs a cast of agencies and officials, from the Commerce Department and the Director of National Intelligence to the Environmental Protection Agency, to get cracking on reports that should outline ways to address those concerns through regulation, legislation, and other means. Most of these studies are due in 180 days.
The executive order also looks to the upside of digital currencies, which it observes can make
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