Here’s an update on the new California digital currency bill.
Legislative staff are receptive to our concerns and may amend the bill, but it remains unchanged. We have also sent a letter with our concerns to the Senate banking committee.
We’ve been hard at work since Assembly Bill 1326 had its language replaced with new language earlier this week. As we noted in a recent blog post, this completely new language does nothing to clarify the status of digital currency users with respect to money transmission law (the original purpose of the bill) and contains language that could be interpreted to cover non-custodial services like mining, providing multi-sig services, or operating full nodes or lightning network nodes.
We have been communicating with legislative staff and are happy to report that they have been very receptive to our concerns and suggested changes. We hope that the new bill will be amended to address our concerns. If that can be accomplished, the final bill may even be better than the previous version as there would be no capital requirements or other similar burdens on covered entities. That said, the bill today remains unchanged, and we cannot support it as it stands.
For those of you who are interested in our complete analysis of it, you can read here a letter we have sent today to the California Senate Banking and Financial Services Institutions Committee, which will soon be holding a hearing on the bill. It lays out in detail our concerns with the bill and our suggested changes.