Guest Column: South Dakota Blockchain Coalition – Elizabeth Warren bill will squelch the entrepreneurship and innovation

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Guest Column: Elizabeth Warren bill will squelch the entrepreneurship and innovation
by Barry Sackett, Chair/Founder South Dakota Blockchain Coalition

A critical bill impacting South Dakota Banking, Trust, and the growing digital asset industry is pending before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. We are fortunate to have Senator Rounds serving on this committee to continue protecting South Dakota businesses.

The Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act brought forward by Senator Elizabeth Warren aims to squelch the entrepreneurship and innovation within this emerging market, and targets digital assets and the utilization of blockchain technology in the financial markets, agriculture, and health care industries.

The importance of South Dakota’s leadership in blockchain technology cannot be overstated. Blockchain technology is transforming the way we conduct business, exchange value, and is heavily impacting the South Dakota Trust Industry.

The regulation proposed in Senator Warren’s legislation essentially makes technology currently being utilized in financial markets around the world unusable in the United States, thus forcing businesses to move overseas to develop products which will become essential in the new world of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The United States is already behind other European and Asian regulators in understanding digital assets, and this legislation threatens to set us back even further.

As of March, this legislation has received additional co-sponsorship from 16 Democratic and two Republican Senators. We have conferred with Senator Rounds Staff regarding this bill, and he has not signed on to support this legislation and has introduced legislation in the past regarding cyber security. We applaud his efforts and encourage him to work with Representative Dusty Johnson to create a bill mirroring Rep. Johnson’s H.R. 4763, FIT for the 21st Century Act in the Senate. Representative Johnson’s bill creates a clear path to appropriately treat digital assets as commodities instead of security instruments.

We support Senator Rounds advocacy for future South Dakota jobs and leading in this critical emerging industry. The United States Congress needs to create and pass a legal framework for entrepreneurs to competitively operate within the global markets and within the U.S. regulatory system to create confidence for the customers and users of the digital asset ecosystem.

Barry Sackett
Chair/Founder South Dakota Blockchain Coalition

6 thoughts on “Guest Column: South Dakota Blockchain Coalition – Elizabeth Warren bill will squelch the entrepreneurship and innovation”

  1. Sorry, but Elizabeth Warren is on to something…scams and money laundering in financial services are rampant and we all can be affected, at least you can with money in trusts and various financial instruments. No wonder it’s a growth industry.

  2. I didn’t understand any of this so like most people my age, I asked one of my kids.
    I happen to have one who works for the Comptroller of the Currency, and he said the proposed regulation is bad for anybody who wants to create new cryptocurrencies and block chains, as well as for people who want to use them for money laundering which is what the major use of them has become.

  3. The move to digital money/economy makes it easier for your money to disappear. They will say block chain will prevent that? I don’t think so.

  4. I barely got through the 1999 Savings and Loan disaster or the 2008 bank and financial institution bankruptcy (Remember Wachovia Bank–they were in the top 5 when they tumbled, Merrill Lynch, had to be absorbed by the “too big to fail” banks, plus numerous other ‘gilt edge investments” now totally off the table). If it can happen to the biggest, most profitable banks, that they are wiped out by a global scam, it can certainly happen that “cyber currency and block chains (whatever that is)” will bring their brand of chaos to the financial markets. We seem to have short memories where financial collapses are concerned.

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