Vinay Gupta, a crypto industry mainstay known for coordinating the release of Ethereum, is looking to pitch President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team on sane crypto policy, he told The Block in an interview.
Inspired in part by Trump’s landslide victory on Election Day, Gupta — who also invented the hexayurt geodesic emergency shelter often seen at disaster sites (and Burning Man) — is looking to move himself and his team at the U.K.-based blockchain firm Mattereum to the United States.
If successful, the move would mark something of a seismic shift in the crypto industry. For years, firms fearful of the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission's “regulation by enforcement” have mulled moving to safer waters abroad. Firms ranging from Coinbase to Ripple, both of which are engaged in active legal action with the securities watchdog, have said the SEC is making it nearly impossible to do business in the U.S. as a crypto firm—largely due to the lack of regulatory clarity and certainty.
Gupta, who has had a career helping to shape regulations in places including the U.K. and Dubai, now wants to do the same in the U.S. On Monday, the Mattereum founder released a policy briefing titled “Putting the Blockchain to Work for America” that he’s hoping to put in front of crypto-friendly politicians who will soon be running the country’s executive functions.
“President-elect Trump’s pro-business agenda could help streamline the machinery of government, presenting a crucial opportunity for the U.S. to solidify its global tech leadership through a thoughtful, flexible approach,” Gupta said. “This could mean the end of the crypto wars which have held back American innovators since the early 1990s.”
“And we are planning to move people (including me) to D.C. soon to help with the crypto transformation of America,” he added.
Part of his plan includes reproducing some of the policies he helped shape in the U.K., including the recently introduced parliamentary bill seeking to formally define crypto assets as property and the successful push to get the country to recognize smart contracts as “actual contracts,” he said.
Gupta says he was one of the technologists consulted by the government in 2019 when the U.K. Jurisdiction Taskforce published its Legal Statement on the Status of Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts that treats these automated blockchain-based systems as binding agreements understood by English common law.
Likewise, Gupta played a hand in shaping the U.K.’s approach to “digital dispute resolution rules,” a set of standards meant to mitigate commercial arrangements that turn contentious. “We are grateful to the UKJT for engaging with the tech and business community to facilitate affordable access to justice and enable vital commerce,” Gupta said at the time.
“We were educators — genuinely educators — not lobbyists,” he said, describing some of Mattereum’s contributions to the LawtechUK process, the government-backed initiative aiming to transform the nation’s legal sector through tech. “We helped educate and shape the consensus which in turn no doubt fed into the law.”
Speaking to Gupta’s influence, Lord Mayor of the City of London Michael Mainelli wrote the forward to another recent Mattereum brief. Mainelli discussed his “Connect To Prosper” initiative, which involves rolling out “‘digital identity infrastructure” and building a “smart economy.”
“We felt that laying out a fair, reasonable and, above all, neutral take on crypto might help a new Washington consensus on crypto form,” Gupta said.
In particular, the recent Mattereum policy brief outlines a plan for the U.S. to harness tech to spur economic innovation across key sectors like real estate, manufacturing and AI. It weighs the benefits and challenges of various regulatory landscapes, from Switzerland's early but complex ruleset to Liechtenstein's straightforward, technology-neutral laws. It also notes Singapore's "coordinated governmental approach may benefit established institutions, but does not cater as well to the dynamic startup scene.
For the U.S., Gupta proposes establishing a blockchain policy incubator and a "neutral convening authority," similar to the Internet Engineering Task Force's role in internet standardization, which would help foster interoperability among different blockchain standards.
That said, Gupta admitted that there may be challenges to his work in the U.S., noting that U.K. law “can be more academic and less political than in America.”
“In America, a delay, a fight, a winner, a loser, and the winner dictates terms. Bipartisan legislative consensus is not common,” he said. “Now the log jam is broken. Get in there and build, build, build.”
While Gupta wouldn’t characterize his regulatory efforts as “lobbying” in the model of agencies like Coin Center or the Blockchain Association in Washington D.C., his firm could benefit from changes in U.S. law.
Mattereum is a blockchain built for tokenization and supply-chain management. One area where Gupta is looking to make a dent is in “re-onshoring” and “supply chain optimization,” especially in areas involving AI.
“‘Prove to me that 100% of the silicon wafers in this satellite came from American rare earth supplies’” type stuff is a great Mattereum use case, he said.
“In a system working that well, ‘lobbyin’ is, if anything, counterproductive. Nobody needs to be ‘sold.’”
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