Crypto in Congress: Diego Zuluaga, Cato Institute
Libertarianism and crypto, the tradeoffs of decentralization, the token safe harbor proposal at the SEC, regulatory capture, and more.
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The eighth episode of HODLpac’s Crypto in Congress interview is available now.
This week, Diego Zuluaga from the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives discusses libertarianism and crypto, the tradeoffs of decentralization, the token safe harbor proposal at the SEC, regulatory capture, and more.
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or read the transcripts below.
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HODLpac:
Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of HODLpac's Crypto in Congress podcast. I'm your host Tyler Whirty. This week's guest is a former colleague of mine at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives: Diego Zuluaga. Diego is the Associate Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute and has spent lots of time thinking about crypto-specific regulatory issues, other relevant financial regulatory topics, and the philosophical underpinnings of these important policy conversations.
So without further ado, Diego, welcome to the show.
Diego Zuluaga:
Thank you, Tyler. It's great to be with you.
HODLpac:
Yeah, absolutely. As I noted in the intro, you and I used to work together at Cato, so I thought an appropriate first topic would be: what is the Cato Institute?
Diego Zuluaga:
So the Cato Institute is a public policy research organization, of which there are many in Washington, DC, and they're usually called “think tanks.” And the Cato Institute’s job is to move public policy, particularly at the federal government level in the United States but also at the state and local government levels, in the direction of individual liberty, free markets, and peace.
So Cato is broadly a libertarian organization and a very broad church in that it welcomes all kinds of strands of libertarianism. And it's also pragmatic in the way that it pursues public policy change. We're always willing to compromise if we believe that the change suggested moves us closer to the kind of world we want to see.
But in addition to working on research in public policy, Cato does a lot of educational outreach and activity about the ideas of freedom, which of course, as a lot of your listeners will know, have a great tradition and very deep roots in the United States in particular – they're very much foundational. And so we raise awareness and point people to resources that explain what the idea of liberty has been over time and how it is always valuable and useful for letting people live fulfilled lives.
HODLpac:
Great, and you're now the Associate Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives – what are you focused on there and what does the CMFA do in general?
Diego Zuluaga:
The Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute was founded in 2015 to bring together a lot of the banking, monetary policy, and financial regulation work that was already happening at the Institute.
After the 2008 financial crisis, there had been an explosion in new financial regulations with the Dodd-Frank Act and also other separate pieces of legislation. And in addition to that, monetary policy has changed a great deal. It has become, in the eyes of some, much more accommodating and there was not – it was perceived certainly at Cato – not enough understanding of the implications of this, of these monetary policy changes, for the future.
And the CMFA was created to address a lot of those challenges because they are particular to a lot of the ideas of liberty – because they involve government getting involved in many other new areas. And usually under a premises that we believe not be very justified. We don't typically buy the standard interpretation of what caused the financial crisis, namely that it was free markets run amok and that government intervention is the solution.
So that was the genesis of the CMFA. And I was brought in 2018 to focus specifically on financial technology, including crypto; because, of course, at the time, there had been, first of all, an explosion in the price of Bitcoin. And then after that a frenzy of new issues of different digital tokens, which call themselves cryptocurrencies, even though some didn’t ever come to fruition.
So over those two and half years that I've been at CMFA, I've written all the subjects related to that. But also on consumer credit lending discrimination and various other areas.
HODLpac:
So, taking a step back, as you mentioned: Cato is a libertarian organization. Crypto is widely viewed, I think, in shorthand as a “libertarian movement.” Do you think that's correct? And why do you think that is?
Diego Zuluaga:
There's certainly a lot of overlap between libertarian ideas and the ideas that led Satoshi Nakamoto – the pseudonymous founder or founders of Bitcoin – to champion this innovation in decentralized exchange. And it is no coincidence that the Bitcoin white paper, which is called a “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” was developed in late 2008.
When the financial crisis was raging, there was a great deal of distrust in banks. At the time, there was a perception in some quarters that the central banks’ interventions to try and restore confidence in the economy weren’t going to work.
And, of course, there's a history of skepticism that central bank management of money can preserve its long term value. And since central banks were created, a lot of fiat monies around the world have lost a great deal of their purchasing power over the long term.
And I think a lot of those views motivated the people who were involved in the creation of the first cryptocurrency and also a lot of the people who have since championed and advocated it as an alternative.
And you know, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useful in countries that are particularly anti-libertarian. I'm sure we'll discuss this later, but in places like Venezuela or in places like even China or Russia – which have repressive financial systems but also other repressive government policies – having a payments network that is wholly independent of government institutions can be promoting of liberty.
HODLpac:
Absolutely. So, as you said, one of the things that Cato does is to educate the general public about the history of liberty as it relates to public policy. CMFA also plays that role and writes about historical financial arrangements like private currencies and payment and banking systems that existed without a central bank. Can you talk a bit about some of the history lessons that might be relevant to crypto related policy?
Diego Zuluaga:
I think the basic lesson of history is that government monopolies tend to deteriorate liberty in all sorts of areas. Because government has the power of coercion, it also has the ability to prevent people from exiting it's particular systems. Those systems tend to work against freedom, but also people's value and, you know, the savings that they hold in the case of money and so forth.
We take that lesson very seriously and we try to raise awareness of the fact that the current monetary international system we have in America is one in which government probably has too much power still. And that central banks’ management, not only of fiat money, but also of financial stability, historically, hasn't been as good as the standard account tells us. We still have lots of financial crises, even though we've had central banks in the United States for 107 years and in other countries for even longer than that.
And we've had very severe financial crises. And in countries that are not as lucky as the United States – that has a well-developed constitutional system of checks and balances – developments are even worse. Central banks under the pressure of governments, either elected or run elected very quickly debase fiat currencies. And they engage in other policies such as co-opting banks to lend to politically connected projects that are not valuable socially or even privately in the long term.
Those things tend to cause economic harm and make people worse off. And so this is a lesson of history in the United States.
We also have a need to explain better what the experience has been and the effects of regulation have been over the years. There's a widespread view that, in the 19th century, we had a Wild West of completely unregulated banking, which is untrue – as the CMFA director George Selgin has amply written about, and also Larry White from GMU, who was one of our senior fellows.
[And the view is that] In the 20th century, regulatory policies – and particularly the policies followed after the 1929 stock market crash – have brought more financial and economic stability.
And we try to bring evidence to bear and use economics to demonstrate to people that those interpretations are incorrect in that we can draw better lessons to improve policy today from having a more accurate understanding of what happened.
HODLpac:
So I want to get into some of those policy discussions later, but before that, you know, you recently wrote a really interesting piece for libertarianism.org’s Visions for Liberty project called “A Libertarian Vision for Cryptocurrencies.” And you talk about how cryptocurrencies may change our economic lives and by extension our political and social lives as well. Can you talk about that article and maybe some of its takeaways?
Diego Zuluaga:
Absolutely. Visions of Liberty was a project that I really enjoyed collaborating with. The idea was to paint a utopian vision of what a libertarian world might look might look like in different policy areas. And so a bunch of my colleagues and I were asked to write specific chapters on areas like online privacy and money and banking and cryptocurrency and immigration and various other areas.
I was tasked with writing the cryptocurrency chapter and I wanted to tackle two particular issues that I find with current discussions around cryptocurrencies and their impact on the future. The first is the perception – held by the people who very strongly support crypto and want it to succeed and want it to grow and see a lot of value in it – that those preferences are very widely shared.
And, secondarily, another view, which I think is related to the first one, that decentralized technology – of which cryptocurrencies are a pioneer iteration – will completely debunk intermediaries because – whether public or private, whether central banks or regulated banks – are more inefficient.
I strongly doubt that both of those premises are true in the first place. I think that a lot of the crypto community has very specific and minority preferences, which are very laudable, which I often share because I'm a libertarian that values those things a lot, but I don't think the general population necessarily does. And therefore the implication is that cryptocurrency will be helpful because it will make the overall environment of exchange more efficient. And it will particularly improve in areas where intermediaries are doing a very poor job, say international payments or record keeping in developing countries, things like that. But I also believe intermediaries will remain because the average person – and the average person is typically the consumer to which firms are catering – likes to have someone to complain to someone that is accountable and can reverse a wrongful transaction or can in other ways address concerns that the consumer has and decentralization has a harder time of dealing with those kinds preferences. Therefore, intermediaries will remain.
HODLpac:
Yeah, I tend to agree that maybe the anarcho-capitalist vision of cryptocurrencies is not one that is particularly likely or even desirable, but, you know, as you said, I think there are areas where blockchain and decentralized networks can provide big improvements. And what are some of the things that you think can be improved by cryptocurrencies and decentralized technology? And what are some of the things that you think maybe aren't well suited for that?
Diego Zuluaga:
Sure. I'd say that, in general, blockchains – there's a reason why they've caught the attention of public policy makers and also a lot of large companies have tried to develop blockchain implementations for their internal processes. Also, individual entrepreneurs are trying to use the technology to develop new ways of delivering products to customers. There's no question about that. I don't want to seem like I am diminishing the technology at all.
But I think blockchains and distributed ledgers in general will be particularly helpful in areas where you have relatively few intermediaries: often government regulated, often entry is limited by government charters or by other prerogatives that governments have put in place such as, for example, designating a monopoly record-keeper for stock exchanges or things like that, or a record keeper of land registries, that sort of thing.
And over time, those because of a lack of competition pushing for innovation and change those intermediaries have degraded and the service they provide is out of step with what people need, but also what technology allows and blockchains because they are non-corporate by definition, make it possible to have entry and competition without requiring, at least at the beginning, regulatory sanction.
And that helps. And as a result of that, you finally get competition from outside and pressure on intermediaries from outside. And if the specific blockchain application is useful, then it can even overtake existing intermediated systems of delivering value.
What's an example I have in mind? International payments.
So if you want to make an international payment from the United States to, say, the Philippines, chances are you have to go through a five or six hoops because you have to go to your small local bank. And that local bank probably has a correspondent bank account. That is, it has a relationship with another larger bank in a big city that then keeps its own bank account with the Federal Reserve. And from your bank to the correspondent bank, to the central bank, your funds will travel from there. They transfer across borders from central bank to the other central bank, and then from there to another correspondent back and finally to the local bank of the recipient, to whom you're sending money.
The example of the Philippines is appropriate because a lot of international transfer from the United States are remittances and remittances are currently quite costly because people typically don't have that many funds to transfer and the fixed cost of serving them is high because of all these hoops that you have to jump through.
As a result, it'd be as much as seven or 8% of the transaction value to get a cross border payment through. Now, Bitcoin of course, was developed as a peer to peer electronic cash system, but there have been other cryptocurrency initiatives that have tried to address international payments. And it's an area in which crypto can actually reduce the amount of – not just of intermediaries – but the amount of steps that you have to go through. You could potentially go to a crypto exchange in the U S and buy some Bitcoin, send those Bitcoin to an address in the recipient country, in the Philippines and that recipient will convert them into a Philippine pesos.
And so that is simpler and so long as you can do it quickly enough that the price of Bitcoin, which is quite volatile, hasn't changed so much as to introduce other frictions, that can be more advantageous. So it's areas like that where I see blockchains particularly succeeding, but at any rate, having them around, having Bitcoin around already puts pressure. It's a bit like allowing people to own gold in its own way. It puts pressure on public authorities and even private banks to do things adequately because people will otherwise see alternative sort of value preserving, but also that allow them to do the things that they would normally do through intermediaries.
HODLpac:
Right, yeah. So that's a great segue into talking a bit about crypto related policy. Your research focus is broader than just crypto stuff. You've written about things like the Community Reinvestment Act, bank regulations and general payments regulation. What have you learned from focusing on this area about how to think about innovations like crypto?
Diego Zuluaga:
It's interesting because in financial regulation, as in other types of regulation, there are broadly two schools of thought. On one hand, you have the people who believe regulation is largely public spirited. And there's a perfectly sound, in many cases, economic argument for regulation, because markets differ from the kind of perfect frictionless environment that economic theory presents, and those imperfections sometimes make it possible for well-informed supervisors to come in and set certain conditions that improve the amount of transactions and in the conditions in which they're undertaken in a particular setting. That's one view.
There's another view that says, yes, that's all very well, but even the people running the regulator aren’t perfect, and they have their own incentives and they're also subject to pressure from people. And therefore we have to look at the specific real life performance of regulators and see whether genuinely regulation actually helps rather than hinders economic activity in the way we want to see it.
And one big concern of that particular school of thought is the capture of the regulated institutions by the regulator. And I think that is a lesson. I very much subscribe to a lot of the concerns of the second school of thought while accepting the theoretical case for regulation.
In many cases, I think that over time, the more financial regulation we get and the more of those regulators become entrenched, the more difficult it is for private sector providers who are offering a valuable innovation to get it through without having to spend a long time making their case.
Or if they're lucky enough, a bit like Uber, to develop such a strong customer base in such a quick period of time as to have a very dispersed, but very powerful base of advocates on their behalf. This is not advocating for Uber's approach, whatever it is, to policy, but it's just an example.
I think that is a key lesson that we have is that regulators will often advocate for the regulated institutions because if those regulated institutions are competed out of existence and they will have no one to regulate, that's a challenge for their own turf and existence. That's something I think we don't keep in mind enough when we're talking about the reasons why policymakers will object to innovation.
HODLpac:
Yeah. I've heard people – and, I'm sure, well-meaning people – say things like, “Oh, crypto needed its own regulator because it's such a new thing.” I imagine you don't agree with that.
Diego Zuluaga:
It's not inconceivable that similar activities would be regulated in a similar way. And therefore, if you're in the business of exchanging currencies, you should be regulated similarly, whether you are a physical office based centralized intermediary like MoneyGram or Rio or something like that or whether you're a crypto exchange. I think that's a sound case.
I'm skeptical that a crypto specific regulator would be good or helpful because crypto is a general purpose technology, a bit like electricity or the internet. And we have a very difficult time predicting into the future and what the actual applications will be.
This is why in the early days with electricity, as well as with the internet, it was very difficult to develop forward looking policy. I mean, one of the reasons why a lot of people praise the Digital Millennium Act of the late nineties is that it was aimed to bring regulation into the internet age, but by not placing a lot of new requirements on companies operating on the internet, and people think that's precisely the reason why we're successful.
And I think this is similar. We have, however, as you and I have discussed many times as well, and among people who follow this, we have suffered from a problem of too few advocates for crypto within the regulators and within legislatures because it's a relatively niche market.
And it's not one that for example, employs very many people or involves significant investment in a particular jurisdiction. And that will therefore cause a politician to be particularly active in defending it.
HODLpac:
Absolutely and I'll take that opportunity for a HODLpac plug because our goal is to support the champions in Congress that exist now and will hopefully continue to emerge in the future. Buy anyway, one of cryptos biggest regulator advocates has been Hester Peirce at the SEC, aka crypto mom, who you know quite well. She recently came out with a “safe harbor” proposal. And I know you've spent some time discussing this and writing about it. So can you explain what it is and maybe some of its pros and cons?
Diego Zuluaga:
Absolutely. If listeners would bear with me for one second, I'll just give a little bit of background. Since 2017, there has been much controversy around the Securities and Exchange Commission regulation of cryptocurrencies because in various enforcement actions, and according to the judgment of various expert lawyers, they fall under the definition of securities.
And that definition of a security is established by legal precedent. Specifically, there's a case called Howey vs the SEC from 1946, which caused the definition of securities to emerge: which are an investment of money in a common enterprise with the expectation of profits from the efforts of others
Because at the beginning of a crypto project, typically, and Bitcoin was of course an exception to this, but because of the beginning of a crypto project, you will have a handful of developers working together to develop a network and asking people for funds so that they can develop it and in due course deliver to them tokens that represent value on that network. You can have a brief window of time in which someone could argue that this is indeed a security: a contract is being offered because you – the interested third party – are giving these developers money into something that looks like a common enterprise and these developers are working together in something that they have an interest in and you also have an interest in the network and so you have the expectation of profits. Maybe broadly defined, maybe you aren’t necessarily looking to make money, but you're looking to get value out of the network. And that value, at least at the beginning will come from the efforts of others, namely, those developers that are working on the network.
So there's been a lot of controversy and I happen to believe that if you subject most cryptocurrencies to securities regulation – with the registration requirements involved and the listing requirements for exchanges that are involved in this as well – you will get very little activity and that activity will be limited to very rich people who for various reasons are exempt from the main component of the securities laws.
So what Commissioner Peirce is trying to do, I think very wisely, is to introduce a period of time during which a project can develop on its own without being regulated as security. And if at the end of that period, which I think is three years, it can demonstrate that it is not a common enterprise where people are investing money to get profit from the efforts of others, if they can demonstrate that, then they will thereafter not be regulated as given either.
So the idea is: we see promise in this technology, we want it to develop, and we will give them some breathing space and take a look at them three years later and see what they've come up with, which I think is a healthy way to look at things.
HODLpac:
I think that's a really good description of one of the main financial policy areas relevant to crypto. But there've been others as well. Like for example, the Libra rollout that you covered. So what do you think have been the most interesting things to cover as a policy analyst in this space?
Diego Zuluaga:
I think the most interesting ones have been firstly, the discussion around whether crypto exchanges can get some sort of federal alternative charter to the various state-based charters that they need to acquire to operate nationwide.
And another interesting one has been Libra.
The reason I think the first one, the money transmitter laws, that are largely state-based, are interesting is that the internet and crypto – which I think is a development that stems ultimately from the internet – has made trade borderless. And so state level regulation struggles to keep up to the extent that it acts as a barrier to entry for small guys that will need to pay four 50 – or 54 in the case of the U S because of the territories and so forth – different licenses to operate nationwide because money transmission law is consumer-focused. So even if I'm a crypto exchange based in California, if people want to deal with me from the other 49 States, I will have to be licensed in those other 49 States to be able to serve them.
So that's a concern, and I happen to believe that there is already scope for there to be federal alternatives that people can use to avoid the high cost of compliance and the cumbersome nature of being regulated in so many different places.
And it's one area where I think particularly underserved consumers would greatly benefit. A lot of America's unbanked use money transmitters to send funds, to send cash to relatives, either at home or abroad. And therefore to the extent you simplify the process by which these people can operate you lower costs and make them better off.
In the case of Libra, what was fascinating is, in the first place, the amazing viral and reaction from so many quarters to what seemed like a very nascent, early days idea. Indeed, some people called it half-baked, which perhaps was a little unfair. When the project was first announced in June of 2019, the concern was certainly that it would take over the world when, in fact, it's just another application of a very promising technology.
And I thought at the time it was very interesting because it would sort of create a hybrid unit that would try to therefore be more value preserving. I had some other concerns about takeoff and so forth, and the project has since changed, but of course it also prompted central banks, which had been largely dismissive of crypto until then to consider digital currencies for the first time in earnest.
And you've had since then, not only in China – which has other issues for other reasons for developing a central bank digital currency – but you've also had in the United Kingdom and in the European Union to some extent and in the United States as well – through the Boston Fed and MIT's partnership with it – very much of an interest in genuine implementations of digital currency, whether token-based or account-based to compete with private sector, existing alternatives. So all of a sudden the interest in digital currency from very unlikely quarters has been aroused.
HODLpac:
Definitely. And, you know, I'm glad you mentioned international competition because – putting aside the digital currency side of things – you mentioned the Digital Millennium Act that helped usher in US-based innovation around the internet in the late 90s and 2000s and many people talk about how the US is at risk of losing on crypto if we don't update our regulatory framework similarly to accommodate it. You're international yourself, you spent some time in the UK policy world before coming to Cato. So what do you think of the international regulatory competition between places like the US and the UK?
Diego Zuluaga:
The UK has a much more centralized regulatory system in finance. It has two regulators, the Bank of England, which deals mostly with prudential issues – that is: risk management, system-wide but also looking at the balance sheet of particularly large banks and making sure that they're sound and safe sometimes more successfully, sometimes less so – and then you have the Financial Conduct Authority, which is much more concerned with consumer welfare competition and the conduct of institutions in terms of fraud and other things. But also promoting innovation. And as a result of that, it's been able to change policy with regard to crypto, perhaps more quickly than the US, because ultimately the FCA was never concerned about losing regulatory turf by defining crypto units – in one way or another – because ultimately they would still be regulated by the FCA. And I think that helped.
The FCA has also has a very strong focus on cybersecurity and staying competitive because unlike the US, because it's such a large economy and it's the hub of so much innovation. The UK, I think, feels the breath of competitor and competing centers like Singapore and Hong Kong and other places closer than the US does and they wanted to adapt. Switzerland is another example of this.
In the US we have a more competitive system of regulators. So we have various different federal banking and securities regulators, the CFTC, the SEC, the Fed, the OCC and so forth, and then the CFPB for consumer issues. But we also have state regulators, which are very important on things like money transmission, and that makes change slower.
It makes regulators warier of losing remit, and therefore it's been difficult to incorporate a little bit of an awkward innovation like crypto, that touches many different things, into existing policy.
On the other hand, you still have a lot of developer activity happening here, and you have the biggest consumer market for crypto in the world. So not everything is lost then.
And you know, I'm not a pessimist in getting change through in general. What I found and, in my less modest moments, I will call this Zuluaga law of crypto policy: the bigger a financial center in terms of the firms that are active in that market, the more crypto friendly policy will be.
And so that would certainly include Singapore, certainly include a lot of the Caribbean international financial centers. It probably could include Switzerland as well. The UK is close to that, even though it's also a big economy but the tradeoff is, or the countervailing factor is the bigger consumer market. The U S is in an awkward position because it fits very well in both boxes. And so there's been this conflict because crypto on one hand is seen as very promising and innovative. On the other hand, it's seen as very risky and potentially threatening to unwitting waiting consumers. And I think that's the reason for the immobility of policy in some cases.
HODLpac:
So as a follow up, you said you're optimistic about fixing some of the issues with regulation as it relates to cryptocurrency. What are some concrete next steps that you'd like to see in order to make that a reality?
Diego Zuluaga:
I think we are getting there on getting an alternative federal payments charter that will ease the activity of exchanges, particularly those focused on crypto exchange. We also have more and more of a development of stable coins, either hybrid ones or ones that are algorithmic and particularly ones that are single currency backed like tether and USDC. And now it looks like Libra will be like this as well.
I think we are very much along the way in those, it would be great to have something like the safe harbor that the SEC has proposed.
And I believe that you have to have some clarification, maybe regulatory, but I think it has to be legislative. And of course, I don't advocate for specific pieces of legislation from my position at Cato. But I think efforts to carve out, given specific circumstances, a scope for digital tokens that are not regulated securities, not regulated as commodities, that are small platforms for exchange that people should be free to develop for a little while before they are regulated by any of the major financial regulators.
I think that is important in order to have ongoing innovation. So I'm very interested in people in Congress developing more of an interest in this issue. And I think, in general, we're moving in the right direction albeit more slowly than I would like.
HODLpac:
So as a final question, you mentioned the need for some legislative action. I tend to agree with that, of course. And you know, we've seen people in Congress increasingly show interest in this area, but yet there's others that ask why Congress should spend its time on an industry, you know, that maybe hasn't lived up to some of the ambitious visions that it's laid out. What would you say to the naysayers that think crypto is just a fad and maybe not worth the time?
Diego Zuluaga:
Well hearing that I'm reminded of that Krugman quote – Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist, the New York times columnist – from the late nineties that in 15 years the Internet's impact on productivity being completely invisible.
He made that prediction. Of course, it didn't turn out right. That's not to say every other prediction that Paul Krugman has made after he's been writing very many other things, but he wasn't all that very successful on that one.
And my answer would be that, this being a general purpose technology and one that's caught the attention of a lot of people, chances are that it will have a long term impact on the economy. And some people seem to confuse the evolution of the Bitcoin price or the Ethereum price or the price of XRP or any other, a crypto token with the success or value of the technology.
And I think by now, it is clear to anyone who knows the technology that the two have become entirely divorced, that blockchain technology and other distributed ledgers are growing at a pace. And they have implementations in the private sector, implementations in government.
And of course, implementations for decentralized technologies, which I think are the most interesting and revolutionary, regardless of the price of any individual digital token. And indeed, regardless of the specific success of one or another crypto token. So let's forget about that.
Let's let the people who own Bitcoin and who owned ether and others worry about their portfolios and let's focus policy on the technology and the promise that it has for improving in my area, the outcomes of people's investments, but also their ability to transfer funds around the world and also to operate in more efficient financial markets that can benefit all.
HODLpac:
Thank you for listening to Crypto in Congress, presented by HODLpac. If you'd like to learn more about HODLpac and our mission, check us out at www.hodlpac.org or follow us on Twitter @HODLpac. Also be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, to get exclusive updates and access to transcripts from each episode, we'll see you next week.