March 22, 2021: FAFT vs America 🇺🇸💵
Why recently published guidance serves to harm America's interests.
Late last week, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published guidance on regulations for “virtual assets” which seeks to undermine America. We’ll provide more context on this proposal below.
Speaking as an American citizen, we will offer our affirmative case for why this threatens America’s interests. We believe the entire world has reason to unite against this proposal, but here we argue from the perspective of Americans, who would be most harmed by this short-sighted proposal.
As American citizens, a strong dollar is clearly in our national interest. We believe the dollar must remain the globally preferred currency.
We also recognize cryptocurrency is inevitably the future of money.
Therefore, the best way to guarantee dollar dominance in the century ahead is for the dollar to be dominant within cryptocurrency.
We’re already here today.
Every Decentralized Finance (DeFi) application prefers to transact using dollarcoins. This guarantees the dollar is being hardwired directly into the future of financial technology protocols. We have the opportunity to rebuild the global internet from scratch, with the dollar enshrined into its core.
This global advertisement for the greenback was not a top-down dictum from the government, but bubbled up from a grassroots movement of developers. In contrast, competitive governments are racing to launch centralized digital currencies to dethrone our advantage.
If other countries successfully launch digital currencies first, which seems likely, they will become the template. We’ve done comparatively little central research, so we’ll be playing catch-up. America’s only way to compete as second-mover will be to leverage the popularity of existing dollarcoins.
Therefore, a robust and thriving DeFi ecosystem is essential to America’s national interest. The mass adoption of these protocols can become the backbone for guaranteeing the dollar remains influential as the world goes digital.
Instead, if we choose to ransack this infrastructure, lock up innovators, and wage war against innovation, we are only undermining ourselves.
As Americans we must loudly oppose efforts to criminalize DeFi, instead we should be looking to invest and encourage its development.
Curve Market Cap is not qualified to advocate for these changes. Curve Market Cap is not a money-maker. It’s an aggregator I built to help me track numbers and learn about innovative technology. I publish these data because I felt the community would also be interested in such transparency and data. I do not stand to lose materially if DeFi is criminalized.
This is why my above argument is focused on the threat to America. I can speak credibly as a concerned citizen. Yet non-Americans should also agree that the threat to innovation is global and advance further arguments against these proposals.
We believe organizations, like the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, the Blockchain Association, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation among others, are capable of assuming the credibility to lead on these issues. The opportunity is on the table. The comment period is open until April 20 for comments from the private sector. Somebody will serve as a conduit for the many voices who are clearly concerned.
Of course, it goes without saying that we support all efforts to crack down on bad actors in the space. Existing regulation focused on strict enforcement at the point of exchange between currencies and cryptocurrencies do an outstanding job of this, which is why only 0.34% of cryptocurrency transactions are illicit.
For more background, here’s some people who have weighed in on the subject with analysis and opinion so far:
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a Curve maximalist.