"It doesn't mean that companies can't be licensed"
Licensed in this discussion obiviously meant the US.
"Coinbase and a16z have already publicly stated that they have plans to set up international arms to hedge against US regulatory risk."
Which is great for them I guess.
"the USA's strong fintech industry"
A tiny, and some might argue irrelevant, part of the US fintech industry is moving offshore.
Crypto to me feels like fusion, it's super relevant, and you just wait some time, you'll see! and then there is another year and another decade and it is still not relevant.
> A tiny, and some might argue irrelevant, part of the US fintech industry is moving offshore.
You'd better be very sure of its irrelevancy before sending it all to the UK, where they're embracing it with a clear regulatory framework. If you are right, the US pushes a small ("irrelevant") amount of crime offshore. But in the off chance you are wrong, the USA risks losing their position as the world's financial superpower. This is not a gamble you want to take if there's even a very small chance that this technology could catch on.
> Crypto to me feels like fusion, it's super relevant, and you just wait some time, you'll see! and then there is another year and another decade and it is still not relevant.
It gets discussed multiple times per week on Hacker News. It's talked about constantly in congress. It's beginning to polarize people so much that it creates single issue voters in both directions. The word "NFT" has been etched into the public's consciousness as a meme. Banks and central governments are issuing bonds and other paper on public blockchains. The US is itself planning a version of the US dollar with a design inspired by distributed ledger technology. More than 1 in 5 Americans own cryptocurrency now. I don't know what measure of "relevant" you are using, but it's obviously very different from mine.
The USA is the world's finance hub because it has the most reliable systems for trading financial assets, and because it has the most reliable currency. But Ethereum network transactions are pretty damn reliable too, even more reliable than wire transfers in some ways (if a bit costly at the moment). Trading on Uniswap is generally more reliable than trading stocks in my brokerage account, and I like how I can bundle multiple trades, borrows and sends together so that they execute atomically, a feature that my brokerage account doesn't support and probably never will. I like that with DeFi, I get to choose my asset-backed loan underwriter separately from my custodian, rather than them both having to be my broker (many of which charge way above market rates for margin loans). Trade settlement happens within seconds, not days. And there has been a cambrian explosion of stablecoin designs, some of them unreliable, some of them quite a bit more reliable than most government currencies.
Is any of it truly better than the current way stocks and currency are traded and held? Maybe, maybe not, but the stakes are much higher than I think most people understand. Distributed ledgers certainly offer some specific advantages that people really sleep on.
> This project, thankfully, was dropped by the Fed after preliminary study.
> USA is the world's finance hub because it has the most reliable systems for trading financial assets, and because it has the most reliable currency
We had the largest consumer market which underwrote a deep financial system. That depth and breadth, together with a rules-based system, is what fuels American financial hegemony. Between political volatility, sanctions and our archaic payment system, we do not hold out reliability as a selling point. (You have to go out to the 1910s to see American financial infrastructure being at the forefront.)
There are definitely lessons to be ported from crypto to our system. But they can come from academia and non-commercial hobbyists or be copied once demonstrated in e.g. London.
> Nope
Yes. You’re citing Q3 ‘22 materials. The programme lost the support it was limping on after Silvergate, SVB and Signatures’ failures. FedNow makes more sense anyway. (We probably wouldn’t have it without crypto.)
As a counterexample, I haven't needed regulations to be able to have great confidence that my Uniswap DeFi trades will settle within seconds. The system is extremely reliable, despite no other participant in it being regulated or even trustworthy.
Licensed in this discussion obiviously meant the US.
"Coinbase and a16z have already publicly stated that they have plans to set up international arms to hedge against US regulatory risk."
Which is great for them I guess.
"the USA's strong fintech industry"
A tiny, and some might argue irrelevant, part of the US fintech industry is moving offshore.
Crypto to me feels like fusion, it's super relevant, and you just wait some time, you'll see! and then there is another year and another decade and it is still not relevant.