Today Congress looks at a resolution calling for a pro-Bitcoin national policy.

The bipartisan H. Res. 835, which was introduced in July by Rep. Adam Kinzinger and co-sponsored by Rep. Tony Cardenas, will be before the House today. Coin Center supports this resolution. We believe that this type of formal articulation of a pro-innovation policy is essential to guaranteeing America’s long term competitiveness in the open blockchain industry. 

Last week we sent a letter of support to Reps. Kinzinger and Cardenas, applauding their forward-thinking leadership in encouraging the development of open blockchain networks, and strongly supporting the resolution. In the letter we outline the challenging regulatory landscape that companies seeking to innovate with these technologies face in the U.S. today:

In recent years, various nations, and the United Kingdom in particular, have taken significant steps to provide a more welcoming home for technologists and fintech firms. Many in the press have identified this growing gap and have warned of a coming exodus of innovative companies. This is a particularly dire state of affairs for American fintech competitiveness given two troublesome structural features of US financial regulation not present in the UK and other nations: our federalist patchwork of incongruous and overlapping state money transmission regulation, and the rules-based rather than principles-based approach pursued by most regulators in this space. These two structural issues are not a product of mistakes or miscalibration by any particular legislature, agency, or governmental body specifically; they are features of the larger historical landscape of financial regulation in the US. A landscape now overdue for pruning.

If passed, this resolution sets forth a sense of commitment from the House of Representatives to develop policies that will alleviate these burdens and position the United States as an attractive place for the next generation of digital currency businesses to thrive.