How Crypto Played the Political Game—and Won 'Bigly' - Ep. 734
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The battle that was in front of us was a political one. And the only way we were going to take the politics out of crypto was to build the largest political operation any industry has ever built and respond to the politics with politics.

Hi everyone, welcome to Unchained, your no-hive resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto nine years ago and as a senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the November 12th, 2024 episode of Unchained.

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Join the community at polkadot.network/ecosystem/community. Today's topic is crypto and the elections. Here to discuss are Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase Chief Policy Officer, and Kara Calvert, Coinbase Vice President of US Policy. Welcome, Faryar and Kara. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having us on. Thanks so much, Laura. Great to be here.

We have had a historic election for crypto. Crypto created the largest single-issue pack, FairShake, and its strategy appears to have been a resounding success in that it resulted in the vast majority of all of its candidates, or all the candidates it supported, winning their races. So what are your broad takeaways from crypto's involvement in this election?

Well, I think for me, at least, my biggest takeaway is a vindication of what Brian Armstrong said at our very first meeting about four years ago when I first started having conversations about coming over to Coinbase.

His focus was very much on what we could do to activate the crypto community. And he was talking about Coinbase customers and the tens of millions that were, you know, customers of Coinbase and what we could do to activate them. And it took a couple of years. But ultimately, we sort of executed on his vision to bring those people into the process.

And it just shows how formidable it can be when you bring the grassroots into politics. I think Karen and I have known that throughout our experiences over the courses of our career, but I don't think any industry has been able to show it as vividly and as quickly as we've been able to. And I think that goes to the support we've gotten from Brian and the executive team, and then more importantly, maybe even the support from the community itself.

Yeah, I would add, I think that what it demonstrates to me is that nothing happens overnight. We build. We've been building now for Coinbase for a decade in trying to get good policy across the finish line. And sometimes it takes years to start to build the foundation and then it can happen really fast. And I think the major, major factor here was, in fact, the, you know, the automation.

nearly 2 million Americans now who've raised their hand, the 52 million Americans who own crypto. Those are really important numbers. And I think the voting block is what I think really punched through the noise this year. - Can I, Laura, if I could just add one more thing, I was looking back

to a blog post that we put out at Coinbase in March of last year. And we very proudly announced that we had 25,000 people signed up for something we had called at the time, Crypto 435. We thought that was quite a number, 25,000. And now, as Kara was saying, we're approaching 2 million people.

uh who have signed up with the standard crypto organization uh the trajectory has been extraordinary it all starts with sort of simple beginnings but it was a vindication of the time and effort we put into kind of launching our own grassroots effort and then ultimately supporting standard crypto with the work that they've done yeah if there's anything i've learned in my time covering crypto it's that uh things can take off very quickly

So I want to dig into the details. So the SuperPAC, which is FairShake, has so far received $204 million in donations. And then as we've discussed, there's also StandWithCrypto, which is a regular PAC and has another $2 million. So for the purposes of discussion, can you briefly explain to the listeners the difference between a PAC and a SuperPAC, but then also what the difference was in terms of what StandWithCrypto was doing and what FairShake was doing?

yeah i'm happy to start so there are two independent organizations that are had are kind of critical pieces of the crypto community's political efforts one is a super pack called fair shake and this is what's known in the tax jargon as a 501c4 organization so it's an independent organization run by a management team uh that we as a company along with a lot of other people in the crypto community decide to invest in

And what we did is we essentially contributed money to Fairshake and the people that run Fairshake made the decisions on how to spend that money, all with the goal of achieving a more pro-crypto Congress. Now, your numbers are a bit off, Laura. It's because of a funny peculiarity in how the FEC requires money.

crypto donations to be recorded. So it overstates the number of bits. So it's about $170 million they receive, but either way, it's the largest. I got those numbers from the Stand With Crypto website, actually. So yeah, I mean, that's the amount of money that's come in, but it gets recorded twice.

Plus, some of that may count the amount of money that's been pledged for the 2025 cycle. But it's a very large number. The second organization is Stand with Crypto, which is also another 501c4 organization. And that's run by a separate management team, completely apart from

fair shake and their job is to organize the crypto grassroots community and they're the ones that are now at i think it's about 1.9 million grassroots advocates and they did a lot of get out the vote efforts and really extraordinary work and kind of setting up for the election

Yeah, the only quick amendment I would make is the Super PAC is different. It's not a C4. It's a different type of organization that allows it to spend directly for and against candidates in what's again called in kind of the FEC jargon, the Federal Election Commission jargon, independent expenditures. And they are the ones that really engage directly in these different pro-crypto, for pro-crypto candidates across the country. Stand with crypto, as Faryar said, was very,

very much focused on mobilizing the voters and focusing across the country, not acting on behalf of any one candidate, but staying entirely nonpartisan. And I think that that was the most incredible thing about both of these organizations is they were nonpartisan in nature, meaning they weren't...

You know, if you think about bipartisan, that's trying to get people to work together. In this instance, they didn't actually look at what the party was so much as are they pro-crypto? Are they anti-crypto? And that was a really remarkable shift. It's very difficult to do. I think that it's often not done. There's not a lot of precedence for raising a $178 million super PAC that focuses on an issue and not on party.

And so FairShake was established by Coinbase along with Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz. How did that come together? How was the decision made to establish this super PAC?

Well, we didn't establish the SuperPAC. The SuperPAC existed. The management team that ran it had previously run another SuperPAC and they reconstituted it into FairShake. And so what we did is we interviewed them and then decided to contribute to them because we felt like we had conviction that they were going to do a good job in representing the crypto community. And Andreessen Horowitz, Ripple, a whole bunch of other donors all came in and similarly contributed to them.

and then ultimately let them do their work. And I think they've done an extraordinary job. - Well, I think it's clear that Coinbase, A16Z and Ripple were large contributors. There were at least 24 donors that contributed to Fair Shake. So it was much more broad based. And I think that that was indicative of the fact that there's a lot of confidence

in the idea of a super PAC that was supporting nonpartisan candidates and the management team discussed those principles, discussed those priorities, kind of that mission first approach. And that I think is why you ended up seeing so many donors come in for the amounts that they did.

So as you mentioned, the candidates that Fairshake was throwing its weight behind were not necessarily associated with any particular party, but were just ones that were deemed to be pro-crypto. But how did Fairshake decide which ones? Was it like a...

you know, having a communication with that candidate or that campaign team beforehand? Or was it just looking at public statements or like what was the level of engagement before deciding who to throw its weight behind?

Well, you really should talk to the guys who run FairShake to get a full sense of how they run what they do. But as a general matter, super PACs have to be very careful that they don't do something that Kara mentioned, which is to do anything that comes across as though they've coordinated with a candidate. So they typically look at the public record. They talk to industry members, stakeholders to get a sense of where a candidate will be on the crypto issue.

So they essentially did their diligence on candidates and based on that diligence, went in in support of and sometimes against a particular candidate.

And remember, you know, they started this process very early on. People didn't quite know what to make of the super PAC. They didn't quite know what to make of the industry. And so there was a real evolution from the very beginning where they first kind of made their mark on the on the election calendar, which was with the California primary, where they came in support of Adam Schiff and.

There were also a couple of House races, one in Texas and one in Alabama that they weighed in on. And that really became a big kind of high impact statement that they made to campaign professionals, to other candidates, that crypto was here to play a very significant role. And they've been doing a whole series of races, something on the order of 55, 56 races. I think they got involved in over the course of the election season. I think there were 20, 18 House races and three

Senate races in the general election towards the end. And so it was a whole bunch of races that they made their impact on. But ultimately, they had to go into where they thought they could make the biggest impact. And their record has been extraordinary. I think they've got something like a 50 and four record. Those numbers aren't precise, but it gives you a sense of how strong they are in terms of the ability to

to support pro-crypto candidates and get real results on the other end of it. Yeah, I saw the Wall Street Journal reported it was 54 of the candidates they had supported had won and only four had lost. But one thing before we go to Kara that I wanted to mention was just when you talked about them supporting Adam Schiff,

And making a statement, at least the way the New Yorker described it in their article on it was that Katie Porter was also running for that seat. And she was most likely not going to win it, but they threw a lot of money into it to defeat her, which just set the tone for other candidates around the country who didn't.

might not be pro-crypto. So it was kind of the way that the New Yorker described it was just a way to get people's attention without necessarily changing the outcome of a particular primary, which was interesting.

Kara, what were you going to say? All I was going to do is I was looking before and before we started today and was just looking at the final numbers. And right now they have Fair Shake has 50 total wins, 44 in the House, six in the Senate. There are still eight races that haven't been called. So there and then again, four losses in the primary. So there are still numbers out there that will be called officially within the next week.

probably day to five days. But that is a pretty incredible record. And races, mind you, that were pretty tough. None of these were a done deal. And so I think that that's critically important to understand that these weren't races that they just went out and picked because they were easy wins. I think it's important that there were pro-crypto candidates out there who engaged and who Fairshake engaged with on both sides of this.

Yeah, probably the biggest one was unseating Sherrod Brown from Ohio, which is my home state, which we'll get a little bit more into later. But, you know, I'm sure you've also seen there were a lot of articles written about just how much money Fairshake had and how this was just such a huge amount for an industry to spend on a campaign. And I wondered if

you know have you seen blowback for that like I you know I the same New Yorker article that we mentioned was questioning kind of the role of um you know outside players like the like like meaning corporations like this in an election and I wondered what the attitude in DC was to this massive effort monetarily I don't think people in Washington had ever seen anything like it I think we were we're a bit of a unicorn in the sense that you had

You had an industry that was not partisan, was very mission oriented in the sense of focusing on who's pro crypto and who's not, and then being willing to go into Democrat races, House races.

more strikingly go into general election races against incumbents, which for people who are in D.C. and kind of understand how Washington politics works, you typically don't challenge an incumbent just because of the risks associated and how hard it is to unseat an incumbent. So there are all sorts of rules of Washington that we've broken as an industry in the political effort that we put into place.

But I think and Kara and I can both speak to this. I think we ultimately felt like we had no choice. You know, we found ourselves about a year and a half, two years ago, finding ourselves being relentlessly politicized and demagogued by a handful of politicians who are trying to fundraise off of attacking the industry. And they were actually becoming very close to being successful to driving democracy.

critical cutting edge industry offshore and essentially killing it in the United States. And so we realize in the end of the day, for all the formidable political policy arguments that Cara and I would put out with members of Congress, with international regulators, with

you know, whoever in the end of the day, the battle that was in front of us was a political one. And the only way we were going to take the politics out of crypto was to build the largest political operation any industry has ever built and respond to the politics with politics.

And I think in the end of the day, I think we've been vindicated with that effort in the sense that we've gone in and gone in Democrat races, Republican races, House, Senate, the whole thing, incumbents, challengers, the whole thing. And as a community have proven ourselves kind of fearless in terms of getting the results we want, we think we need to get.

And we feel pretty good about it. Yeah, I just wanted to add about Sherrod Brown, you know, to underscore your point about incumbents. He had been in the Senate in that seat for 17 years. So that's why it was such a big win for the industry. And frankly, you know, you guys put, I guess, $40 million into that effort, which is

is a huge amount of money. So Fairshake had put its ammunition into these congressional races, but it chose to stay out of the presidential race. Why was that? Well, our focus from the very beginning was to impact the congressional elections. And so the mandate that Fairshake had was to spend in the congressional races. All the contributions all of us made were all earmarked for the congressional race.

And I think we just decided at the end of the day that the place we can make the biggest impact is in Congress. But obviously, the president matters a lot. And it's kind of hard to get into a presidential race because the outcome is so binary. If you pick one versus the other, it's not like in Congress where you've got a lot of different members of Congress. And if one wins, one loses, you can sort of figure it out. What ended up happening, and we know neither, none of us expected this. Karen and I didn't expect this.

We had President-elect Trump come out or candidate Trump come out with an extraordinarily forward leaning position on crypto.

And then ultimately, when Vice President Harris became the Democratic nominee, we found ourselves in a pretty good dialogue with her team. And so and so, you know, we stuck to the kind of strategy that we began well before the presidential cycle really began in earnest. But I think the events that followed ultimately proved that that ended up being a pretty good, pretty good result in the sense that we felt like we were in a pretty good position in terms of

without any question being in a place where either side would, if either side would win, we'd be in a much better position than we've been with the Biden administration.

The critical focus on Congress, though, also had to do with, again, the North Star of winning here is getting good crypto policy and getting legislation across the finish line, getting a regulatory regime. And that means we had to have a pro-crypto majority in the Congress. And so that was really the focus. I also think that it's important to recognize that for the first time,

We actually passed legislation in a really big bipartisan way in the House earlier this year, and it was moving forward in the Senate. And the goal isn't just to elect pro-crypto candidates for pro-crypto candidates' sake, right? It's to get something done in, you know, hopefully before the end of the year now, but in 2025,

setting it up for, again, you know, five, 10 years down the road. So that's, again, you know, the president hugely, hugely important, as Faryar said. But I think when it comes down to making sure that we can pass legislation that's meaningful and can withstand the test of time, that's where we had to invest.

And what was the reaction to the fact that the organization didn't necessarily align with one party or the other? Because, you know, it choked me to keep referencing this New Yorker article, but it did give a lot of kind of like the tea on what was going on in the background. And apparently, like both parties were super annoyed at Fairshake. So I wondered kind of how that affected relationships with both parties. Well, look, it took a lot of adjustment by parties.

congressional leadership on both sides to kind of get their mind around what we were doing. I think they just never seen anything like it. But we were very eager to tell our story and how critical it was for us, as Kara said, to get legislation and actually even before that to talk about how extraordinarily abusive the treatment of the industry had been at the hands of regulators who were trying to drive the industry offshore. And I think it struck them how

intensive, the feelings were on the part of the industry. And it wasn't simply, you know, a handful of big players. It was grassroots. You had

you know, crypto innovators in middle of Pennsylvania or middle of Ohio would come in and say that they couldn't get simple checking accounts. They couldn't get their, they couldn't get a home equity loan. They couldn't get an auto loan. They couldn't get a mortgage because the bank regulators were squeezing them out. And as far as we could tell, and we'll find out with time, but it felt like it was being politically driven by, you know, the White House and a few members of Congress who were sort of instigating this. And so it was essentially a battle for

for freedom, for

community to be able to make a choice without being attacked for it. And so when people were said to us, well, you're doing things differently, this isn't the conventional kind of Washington way, why are you doing this? We were eager to share the story how we don't think we've ever seen an industry that's been as targeted as ours has been. And we just need to do what we need to do to make sure that the 50 million Americans own crypto aren't punished for it. And I think that was the right thing to do.

I think it also, if you look,

One thing that both Republicans and Democrats can care, can agree on in Congress is how their constituents feel about a certain issue, right? Constituents always drive at the end of the day or most times drive the decision making for policymakers. And when you have Republicans, Democrats at the grassroots level coming out and saying, you need to do this, you need to think about crypto in a different way. It's meaningful. It impacts my life, my job, my family. That was a huge ground shift. So you had certainly the,

you know, the issues around the super PAC spending. And that was certainly a big, big piece of this, but also the fact that it was very contextualized with everyday Americans who cared about this, who thought about this as part of their economic ability to continue to build wealth or their ability to have jobs, their ability to provide for their families. That was a huge impact for Republicans and Democrats. And so we had to tell both stories. And I don't think it would have been as successful with

just with just one of those, just the super path or just the grassroots. You had to do both.

Yeah. In fact, I think Laura, Karen, I've talked about this. If you had to pick the one silver bullet that we've had in all of this, it hasn't been Sandware Crypto. It hasn't been Fair Shake. It's been when we brought constituents in front of members. I forget the numbers. We had something like 40 or 50 House members that we brought constituents in front of in the lead up to the Fit 21 vote. And we picked up every single one of those votes. I think the moment

members saw what Kara was describing, that this is a real thing with real constituents doing very cool, innovative things in their own backyards. It just the light went on immediately. And we we bought ourselves a vote and we bought ourselves an advocate. And it was all thanks to the constituents sort of speaking up. And that was really, really impressive to see happen. Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but

a couple of weeks ago now, I guess, like right before the election, I did publish an opinion piece in Time. And, you know, as a reporter, I'm not supposed to say these things, but as an American, I was like, I think I need to like break out of my neutral position because I did feel that the industry was treated so unfairly. I saw that you had talked about the comparison between crypto and like 5G tech semiconductors, which also, you know, Sheila Warren, I guess,

She was the one who initially had this like long tweet thread about that. But can you just explain a little bit to the listeners what this comparison is? And then also tell us how far do you think the U.S. is behind when it comes to crypto? So for the listeners who may not be aware, you know, there's been two big technology developments that have caused huge national security angst.

One was when kind of as a country, we began to realize that the next generation of cellular mobile phone technology was being built by a Chinese company and being installed and integrated into the phone systems of countries all around the world, including NATO allies, European Union allies, and so on. So this is the 5G issue. The next generation of mobile technology was essentially being built by a Chinese company

And there's a lot of speculation and you'll see a public reporting that by virtue of being having been the ones that built that technology, the Chinese were have been able to build in back back doors and other sort of surveillance sort of capabilities.

And the US stood on the sidelines of that. The US technology had sort of been bypassed by the Chinese and was kind of largely irrelevant to these companies that wanted to put cutting edge technology in place. And then the other is the semiconductor issue. You know, we used to be a leader in semiconductor development.

And now that have moved offshore and that you've seen Congress appropriate tens of billions of dollars to try to bring semiconductors in the United States. Electric Capital did a really interesting survey on open source code software developer activity. And I think they estimated maybe about three, four years ago, we were about 40 some percent of global share of open source code software developer activity. So this is the basic software coding that goes into crypto. We're now down to, I think, the mid to low 20s.

And so you're seeing that the US is precipitously losing ground as being a center of crypto innovation. I think for people in the industry, it's not a surprise because if you go to talk to any crypto lawyer and if you're a crypto innovator, the first thing they'll tell you is leave the country, do it somewhere else, don't do it here. And that showed you Gary Gensler and others were largely successful in trying to drive the industry out. And if they had more time, they'd probably be able to pull it off.

And, you know, we just, you know, it's part of the big part of the message that we put out there, which was that there's a national security threat here. And I think increasingly that resonated with a lot of members who began to understand that they made the mistake twice with semiconductors and 5Gs and we just can't repeat it with digital asset technology.

But interestingly, the innovators and those builders who are leaving the country are not going to any kind of jurisdiction that has no regulatory regime. I think there's this common misperception that any kind of builders, they're just racing to where there are no rules.

Instead, they're racing to place where there are rules. And certainly when you have American investors or when you have investors from overseas, they don't want a new company to go into, you know, in some sort of regulatory black hole, right? They want them to go somewhere where they can build, where they have clear rules, where their company can be around in five and 10, 15 years. So that's why you see people going to Singapore, to the EU, to the UK, to Australia. They're all ahead of the United States in their regulatory efforts.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really been, um, quite the, uh, battle in public perception. Like literally even last night, somebody kept tweeting at me that, um, the industry didn't want rules and that's what would happen under Trump. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. You can look five and a half years ago. I wrote an article about how the industry was so frustrated. There were no rules. I was like, this is so long overdue, but this person insisted back to me. And I was like, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Tell them to go look at the state laws and all the proliferation of state laws that are cropping up. We have very strong regulators. We've just got 50 of them. Yes, yes, which creates another headache, another type of headache, rather, for the industry. But I did want to ask a little bit also about this strategy that Fairshake had because Fairshake

So this is something that we reported on Unchained, but due to the seniority rules that the Democrats follow for their committee appointments, now that Sherrod Brown has lost its seat, Senator Elizabeth Warren is

the leader of the so-called anti-crypto army is now the ranking member which obviously that's the minority party um but that's on the senate banking committee which is an important committee for crypto um so if what could happen is that if the democrats ever take the senate during these next six years because she was just re-elected she would then become the chair of the committee so i wondered what that calculus was behind trying to unseat brown

Well, I think we had to take each race on its own terms. And Fairshake ultimately made the decision to go into that race. But

I think, you know, what we're doing as a community is largely changing the politics around crypto. What used to be kind of a low cost thing, which is to kick the crypto dog and not pay any consequences for it, is now demonstrating itself to be quite consequential. And you had a large part of the Democratic caucus taking their cues from Elizabeth Warren without even realizing it. I mean, we talk to members and say, why did you sign this letter accusing us of facilitating illicit finance where there's no evidence of it?

And they would largely, you know, the staff would tell us kind of off the record, oh, because Warren asked for it. So I think members will have to make a decision whether they kind of

do what Elizabeth Warren tells them on crypto, or they kind of make up their own mind. And my guess is we'll find more and more members making up their own mind. And think about it. We've got, what, of the four House members that are, four House Democrats who've just come into the Senate, all four are significantly pro-crypto voices. So Lee Slotkin, Andy Kim, Ruben Gallegos, and Adam Schiff. And

The caucus, the Democratic caucus is shifting. There's a generational shift that's occurring in the Senate. So we'll see what happens. But in the end of the day, you know, our politics are broader than just the kind of the seniority on one particular committee. And, you know, and I think and I think the politics will shift. I think Leader Schumer has been really thoughtful on the crypto issue and we expect that he'll remain that way. And the new administration will be good on it. So I think we're quite comfortable with how things have landed. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think there was a bit of a vacuum, right, particularly on the Senate Banking Committee with Senator Brown at the top. The only hearings that they had on crypto were about illicit finance, giving Senator Warren really a platform from which to talk about all the, you know, the parade of terribles rather than focus on all the benefits, rather than focus on how we ensure a regulatory regime that creates a level playing field that actually helps protect

prevent market structure legislation in and of itself is a way to ensure that we prevent bad actors from entering the market here. So I think having, you know, having a different chairman, having a focus that extends beyond just illicit finance, I think will take away some of that momentum and actually make it a much broader conversation. And I think

You don't have to look any further than the existing Senate Ad Committee right now under Democrat Debbie Stabenow, where she has been very thoughtful in trying to create a bipartisan solution. So I think the hope is that under the under new leadership that hopefully that Senator Warren will work with Republicans and find a solution that addresses both the market structure concerns and then by nature will address her AML concerns.

All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about the future of some of crypto's favorite people in D.C. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Overwhelmed trying to manage your crypto investments? Introducing iYield, a free financial planning tool for crypto natives.

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Back to my conversation with Faryar and Kara.

So I was joking when I said we're going to talk about crypto's favorite people, because I do just I out of curiosity have to ask, do you think that because of what happened here with this red sweep of Congress and the crypto money being so influential and all that, do you think that Elizabeth Warren's power in the Democratic Party is like on the wane or greatly diminished? You know, what what do you see as kind of her future and her ability to influence Democratic policy on crypto?

It's hard to know what her influence is going to be broadly beyond crypto, but I think for crypto, the crypto issue,

She herself is now kind of goes out of her way. And she said this during her campaign against John Deaton, that she has nothing against people owning crypto or trading crypto. And she's tried to be much, much more conciliatory on it. So her voice has been significantly more conciliatory. I also think for a lot of members of her caucus, I think they're beginning to see that kind of aligning with her reflexively on

kind of anti-crypto positions probably ultimately hasn't been the right thing for them. Sherry Brown being a really good example. And so we'll see how that plays out. You can, it's, you know, it's a, it's always a bit of a fool's errand to try to predict how politics will play itself out. But, you know, fair shake made it, had a big impact this cycle. They'll have a big effect next cycle. We expect the Stanford crypto organization will hit 4 million advocates and a much, much more sophisticated, get out the voter operation. And

And if people want to mindlessly demagogue the crypto issue, there's going to be a whole bunch of people ready to hold them to account. And I think people, I think politicians know that. And if they don't know it now, they'll know it soon that the crypto, the pro-crypto army is ready to go and excited to engage in the 2026 cycle.

I think the goal, too, is to ensure that as I mean, we saw this in 2016 and we saw for four years, we saw it then under under President Biden. The party, the opposite party, is always going to try to demonize anything that's coming out of the administration. And I think the goal is to make sure that crypto doesn't get caught up as the punching bag in between that kind of that, you know, that kind of criticism or that kind of aggressiveness toward any particular Trump administration.

Trump rules or Trump regulations. And so that, I think, is where we're going to just have to continue to work with both sides of the aisle, continue to push for legislation that has longevity beyond any single administration. But ultimately, we just don't want to be in the punching bag between the administration and Democrats.

Yeah, I mean, that was clearly the position that crypto found itself in after the year 2022. And it was just such an interesting juxtaposition of events because basically, you know, Sam Bankman Freed and FTX had played a role in those midterms. And so after the collapse of FTX, then I remember, you know, Coindesk came out with an article saying one in three members of Congress have accepted money from SBF or other executives at FTX.

And so how did this turnaround happen? Like, do you feel that it was just the sheer amount of money or do you feel that it was Trump coming out and being pro crypto? And then the Democrats suddenly realizing this was a losing issue or like what? How how did the industry come back to be in this position that it is now where so many members of Congress are pro crypto from, you know, this big black eye?

Well, it's hard to say definitively, but I think we were very, very systematic about how we approach this election cycle. And I think it all began with a policy. You know, the issue that we would take to members is, are you really ready to stand by and let a handful of regulators and Elizabeth Warren drive a cutting edge technology offshore? And we would remind people that the country that's the biggest

investor in blockchain technology is China. And we've seen now China with the Enbridge, you know, the network that they're trying to build between the central banks as an alternative to SWIFT, that the technology of tokenization and crypto is

So the is being adopted broadly, including by the Chinese, the Russians and others in an effort to circumvent the U.S. financial architecture. And so a lot of our efforts, I mean, for sure, people talk about the politics because the politics are obviously kind of.

you know, highly visible and it's generated a lot of press. But when Cara and I would talk to members and just sit down and just say to them, listen, this tokenization thing isn't just some trivial thing. This is not just some meme coin that we're here defending. We're defending the next generation of the internet, the value layer of the internet, Web3. And by the way, if we don't adopt it, there's a whole lot of other countries who want to be strategic leaders in this space. And so it began with that.

And then it went to the fact that you at the administration, the Biden administration itself said from the beginning that it wanted market structure legislation and it wanted stablecoin legislation. So we weren't asking for anything that Democrats, at least the leader of the Democratic Party himself, had not said, at least in principle, that he was for.

And once we realized that the substance of the arguments kind of only got us so far, then we just started the political efforts. And so it was a bit like, so it wasn't like we were selling a hard message. We were actually selling a kind of a very simple, obvious point. Most of the other, virtually every other G20 economy was well underway, provided clarity in the space. And the US should try to keep up before we lose even more of a share of the crypto software developer activity that was moving to other jurisdictions.

And it all just kind of came together in the end. And it was, you know, one part this, two parts that, but it was a combination of things that ultimately got us to where we are. We also, I think, just the evolution of two years' time in a very rapidly evolving market, right? So the use cases themselves became much more tangible, much more easy to understand. The rise of stable coins, the use of crypto for payments, right?

the use of crypto for remittances, the ability to save billions of dollars for Americans just in international transfers. Those are issues that Republicans and Democrats can understand together and I think really brought them to the table to realize this did impact their constituents in more than the way that we

we could go and explain it into their office. So the use case is evolving, the ability to use it for things like healthcare records, NID. California now is using blockchain technology for your driver's license. You can use it for phishing licenses. There are real world tangible use cases now. And I think that that two years has made a difference. In another two years, it will become even more pronounced. And two years after that, even more pronounced. So the hope is that, again, the technology, that the policy can keep pace with the technology of

this point. Laura, there's one other thing which, you know, I'd never seen before in my career, and I'm guessing Kara probably maybe not has in either, where it was very, very typical, and this is true globally as well, when we meet with regulators and officials around the world, but it's certainly true in the U.S. with members of Congress and

policymakers. It was rare to go into an office where there wasn't a staffer in the room who didn't have himself or herself high conviction on crypto and wasn't extremely smart on the issue, or a family member or a friend of the policymaker who was kind of far up the learning curve on crypto and understood really what was at stake.

So a lot of the conversations we had, unlike anything I've ever done before in my career, were often organized around, you know, my staffer here tells me this thing is like the future. Tell me whether he or she is right.

My cousin tells me this is my son tells me, you know, my daughter, my, you know, my brother in law, you know, is so it was a really it's a really funny but personal way. And every time that would happen, we would appreciate it because people were kind of sensory letting their guard down.

And asking a really good question, which is kind of look, I don't I don't quite get this thing. Explain what it is. I know Elizabeth Warren's telling me I'm supposed to be against it, but I don't really understand it. Help me understand it. You know, we've been very, very lucky about that. And that's where the that's where the 52 million Americans actually first made their presence in our policy efforts, because they happen to be lurking everywhere in the worlds of policymakers. And we appreciated them.

Yeah, actually, one other thing that I wanted to mention was after I published my timepiece, a whole bunch of people reached out to me to say that they agreed with me and they were also closet Democrats or whatever. And many of them said when Elizabeth Warren ran for president, I supported her and I did not understand why she was against this technology that could bring about the exact change that she talked about in her speech.

So it is so interesting. It does feel like there's somewhat of a generational difference here, which is kind of what we're seeing with younger members like Ro Khanna and Richie Torres being, Kirsten Gillibrand being more pro-crypto.

So let's talk about another one of crypto's favorite people, which is SEC Chair Gary Gensler. He will be most likely either demoted to the role of commissioner or potentially he could just choose to leave the SEC of his own volition. And we're seeing that several names are already being floated as potential replacements. There's Dan Gallagher, the Chief Legal Compliance and Corporate Affairs Officer at Robinhood. Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who now has a consultancy and is part of...

one of the digital chambers, tokenization boards, I forget the name of it. It's like tokenize or something. There's Richard Farley, who's a Wall Street lawyer, may not be pro-crypto. And then lastly, Mark Uyeda, although this person might be more of an interim SEC chair, he's currently a commissioner who often will do a dissent with pro-crypto commissioner like Hester Peirce. And I wondered kind of what your opinion was on those various picks or if you're hearing other names.

Like all those people you named are super talented people, but almost anyone will be a significant upgrade from the current chair of the SEC. I don't think there's ever been in the history of the agency a chair that has so recklessly politicized the role of an extraordinarily important agency. I mean, think about it. The SEC is the guardian of our capital markets. I mean, the

America's national security power largely stems from its economic power, and its economic power largely stems from the fact that we have the most effective and efficient markets for raising and allocating capital. And for an SEC chair to take that grave and critical mandate

and abuse it for the purposes of targeting an industry, presumably for his own political purposes and thinking it's a clever move to essentially get himself promoted to another job or God knows what, I think was a disgrace. And I think any other person coming into that position, there's very few people who will be as, you know, craven in terms of how they approach a job. And I'm sorry, I'm using kind of hard language, but

You know, we find ourselves in court or, you know, observing and our lawyers are better placed to speak to this, but the SEC changing its theory of the case against crypto in different cases, arguing simultaneously in two different parallel cases, two different theories of why a crypto token could potentially be an investment contract or be a security. That's just not a way to run an agency whose function is so critical to get right.

so luck there are a lot of really really talented people that are in that list that you went through uh but really at the at the most basic level we just want somebody who's understands how important the role of the sec is has some basic commitment to the rule of law and fair notice

And wants to put the U.S. on kind of a trajectory to, you know, remain a leader in financial services by virtue of being able to adopt technology as it arrives without kind of taking an aggressively and reflexively hostile posture towards them.

I also think that having a chair who is collaborative in nature with the CFTC, critically important. This has been now a turf war, a very aggressive turf war for the last three and a half years. But even prior to this administration, there were questions of, is this a security? Is it a commodity? How do we regulate this? And so I think the goal is to have a chair who recognizes both the need for that kind of collaboration, but also the recognition that the CFTC, while

that agency may need some clear legislative authority. The SEC largely has the ability to solve some of these basic questions on things like record keeping, on things like, you know, how do you use a blockchain to record different transactions and how do you do it in an atomistic way? So there are things that the SEC can do today. And under this administration, they have chosen not to. And under a new chair, and I think

the names that you've mentioned, and I think that there are others out there who want to look to how you solve these problems, not just saying the existing rules work, just come in and register. I think that is at its core what the Senate should be looking for, and any new chair that comes in should be, how are they going to enable these innovations? How are they going to enable the new types of technology that will change and make our markets more efficient, prevent fraud, prevent unemployment,

a range of investor issues, right? It can actually be for good. It doesn't always present risks. Blockchain technology is a good thing and can help investor protection. So that's, I think, I would urge the Senate as they start to contemplate who this chair might be, that they ask those tough questions.

- Laura, and think about it, like, I apologize. So if you think about it, Laura, you know, I used to work for one of the large banks and a huge part of the risks that banks carry in capital markets activity is the lag between when a transaction occurs and when final settlement occurs. So you have a day, two days,

potentially more depending on if a trade occurs on a Friday and settles on a Monday or let's say it's a long weekend and it's a long holiday weekend, then you add even more days to it. And that lag period is a source of extraordinary systemic risk to the financial system, to our broader economy. And so you've got a gigantic gap.

infrastructure of regulation and capital requirements and all the rest guarding against this, that lag is completely unnecessary if we adopted blockchain technology in settlement of capital markets activities. You can have instantaneous atomistic settlement. You'd instantaneously remove one of the largest sources of risk

in our capital markets, this lag between transaction date and settlement date would immediately go away. We'd be a safer, stronger country. Our financial system would be more resilient. And that's just adopting the technology in one specific application. Gary Gensler could have gone

significant made significant progress in helping allow for that to happen. Instead, he chose to politicize the agency. And and I can't imagine another SEC chair wouldn't see the opportunity that exists to to address a source of systemic risk and deal with that. And there's a multitude of examples of all of that. But it's kind of crazy that we've wasted four years and and and haven't addressed issues like that.

Yeah, well, you know, speaking of their mandate for consumer protection, like we saw that issue and the delay affect the whole Robin Hood situation. And so many everyday retail traders really got hurt by that. And then on top of that, just to Kara's remarks about this SEC and CFTC working together. I remember I watched this interview that Brian Armstrong did with the Wall Street Journal and said,

The reporter asked like a question to kind of press him a little bit on the SEC, which I don't remember the exact phrasing of the question, but it was something where he was trying to say, well, you know, aren't you trying to skirt the rules, blah, blah, blah. And Brian said, no.

Oh, no, but you need to understand in other countries, we don't make they don't make this distinction between a security and a commodity between their regulators, at least. And so what this is, you know, emblematic of in the U.S. is that there is just this turf war like other countries just don't even have to, like, get hung up on that issue. And so that's why they're moving forward so quickly.

And yeah, that's what allowed crypto to become a little bit more of a political football here. And that's also why we saw these delays. So I did want to ask, though, because, you know, we have had four years of Gary Gensler in charge of the SEC. So there's so many core cases of the SEC against crypto companies, including Coinbase.

There's all these Wells notices that have gone out recently, Uniswap, OpenSea, Crypto.com, Immutable. There's recent lawsuits that got started because consensus is one. I don't think it's quite gone as far down the court judicial processes like Coinbase and Ripple. But what happens to the cases? What happens to the Wells notices? What do you foresee happening between now and January? Yeah.

Well, any number of things could happen. I mean, one is that Gensler could decide to go out of the SEC in a blaze of glory and just sue everyone that he hasn't sued and just sort of force the next chair to deal with the mess that he and the chaos that he leaves behind. The other is that there could be some sort of last minute rulemaking just to kind of, you know, vindicate his legacy to some extent, actually kind of address the

what's been the kind of most egregious aspects of his failings which is the failure to initiate some sort of rule making so we don't actually exactly know what's going to happen we're sort of ready to expect the unexpected with him but i think i think the new chair is going to have a hard time

It's hard to kind of sweep a wand to cases that a new chair inherit. So I think whoever President Trump picks is going to be a very formidable and talented leader and will understand how to manage these cases. But there'll be a process necessary to resolve or unwind these cases.

And we'll see how that works. Or they may go through to the courts ultimately, and we expect fully to get vindicated. It'll take a few years. And just when you say unwind the cases, do you mean that even for ones that are far along in the process like Ripple and Coinbase? Or what does unwind mean?

Well, you know, I'm not predicting anything, but I'm just saying if there were a new chair who decided that any of these cases lack merit and weren't in the interest of the agency to pursue, you know, there'd be a process by which they'd have to figure out how to resolve them. And one way to do it would be to achieve some sort of settlement with the parties. And the question then becomes, what are the terms of those settlements? Or I guess they could unilaterally

you know, drop the case. Um, but it's hard for me to kind of guess, um, kind of what would happen or how that would proceed. Uh, my point is really to say it's complicated. It's not like new chair comes in, you just sweep the deck and all those cases go away. Uh, a new chair is going to have to figure out how to deal with them and, and, and it's going to be complicated. And

I think also you mentioned the Wells notice, the notices that have gone out, Laura. And I do think if you, again, we through Stand With Crypto, Coinbase, we've had a lot of conversations with founders, with startups across the country, and they say that they are consistently getting Wells notices. And so when their third, fourth,

fifth employee and when their lawyer bills are bigger than their engineering bills because they have to deal with Wells notices, that is something I think that, or subpoenas in general, that's something I think that could have an immediate tangible effect outside of the scope of these large cases. And if you start to reduce that unnecessary litigation responsibility and cost on these small

small startups, that's, I think, when you really start to see the proliferation of use cases of the technology of new and of ways to have payments. So you'll have your large cases. Those may take time. That is not a done deal in any way, shape or form. But these small, you know, these small just kind of nuisance, nuisance notices that I think could have a real impact on the underlying market.

All right. So now, obviously, we have a Republican president, we have a Republican Congress. So what would be the top priorities that you would have for this administration and or Congress? Well, we're very hopeful that there'll be movement on legislation in the lame duck. There's been such good work done in producing bipartisan legislation in this Congress, ironically, even with all the opposition from the White House and Gary Gensler. And so, you

Our hope is that Republicans and Democrats will come together and realize this issue that should have never been politicized in the first place should get addressed and legislation should move. Now, you know, there's got to be— Would that be market structure or stablecoin or both? There's no reason why it shouldn't— it can't be or shouldn't be both. In the end, my guess is it'll be too hard to do it all. Plus, I'm sure Republicans will be of a view that they should leave some of this for a Trump administration to resolve. But I know from our perspective,

There's no way to get legislation through Congress in a resilient kind of enduring way without Democrats and Republicans. And fit 21 is a really, really good starting point. There's some good bills that were introduced in the Senate that could be, you know, kind of the basis of of, you know, end of year action. And so our focus is going to be to see what we can get done in the lame duck.

And then for sure on stable coins as well. But, you know, we'll need to see if there's room for it. I think also in terms of just our broader administration, I think the goals with the new administration, one thing we've talked a little bit about is just the criticality of banking services for this industry. And under this last administration, there was a very concerted and public effort to make sure that the banks were

felt pressure from their prudential regulators to not bank these small companies and frankly, any crypto company. And so I think the recognition that that debanking for legal businesses is not a good public policy position and hopefully that that that is resolved in the coming year. Yeah. Maxine Waters is actually on her own, said kind of expressed a lot of concern about the debanking of the crypto sector and has said that that's just not

anything that she thinks it's okay. So it's a really interesting issue that has bipartisan resonance and is a really important one, as Kara said. Huh. And did she make those comments recently or? Yeah. In fact, she said it, I think it was just like a few weeks ago, right, Kara? I'm trying to remember when she did. But before that, she wasn't saying that or? No, I know she said that in conversations with us. And I think she

has said it publicly as well. So it wasn't a surprise when she said it publicly, but I don't quite remember offhand when it was. Okay, just because the Operation Chokepoint 2.0 has been talked about for, I guess, a little over a year and a half now. So I didn't know if this was like a change or if she had long been saying that.

I think what she has said recently, again, is this idea that if you have everyday Americans who are trying to build businesses that can't get banking services, that's a problem. She's also said that she wants to get stablecoin legislation done, that she's interested in market structure and what she could do next year. So I think that there's hopefully a recognition there that, again, Democrats, Republicans need to work together on some of these big issues and debanking is part of that.

Okay. Well, something that I am just so interested in is I feel like, you know, market structure, stablecoin, those, you're right. Like that should be, it should have been done well before this. But one of the stickier issues is how to regulate DeFi. And there we have kind of like a confluence of issues. One is obviously privacy, but another is national security, which has become this issue because of how North Korea has been

hacking d5 projects to grow its nuclear weapons program and i wondered if the crypto industry has already been thinking about how to regulate it in a way where it kind of like weighs those interests against each other i think from our perspective i think the mika approach to d5 has was the right one which is to deal with a low-hanging fruit of the

of the market structure legislation and the stablecoin legislation and really let DeFi to develop as a ecosystem before figuring out how to regulate it. And so we've been very much of a view that it's important for policymakers to kind of get up the learning curve on how DeFi works and what it does, but not to jump the gun and potentially impede the development of the sector without kind of letting it move forward.

Our first thing has really been just to kind of urge caution on this. And I think we've also sort of the principle that we've tried to use is if there's no custodial activity, if there's no kind of individual or an entity that's custodying a person's assets, the same imperatives that you have on regulation just don't apply. And so if you've got two people freely transacting through the use of a software protocol, that's a completely different thing than what Coinbase does in terms of

you know, custodying and persons assets, which, you know, which, which then, you know, merit for sure.

regulations and all sorts of oversight because of just for obvious reasons. I think a general principle that we've certainly adopted when we're working through legislation is the technology itself. When you think about legislation, again, that's going to last five, 10 years, it should really be technology agnostic. It shouldn't try to regulate underlying protocols. It shouldn't try to regulate software. And that has been a longstanding principle going back really to the encryption wars of 1996.

when you started to think about how do we, where and when should standards apply? When should we make sure that it's standards-based, not a heavy regulatory hand? We saw that all the way through the internet age, all the way through as that developed in terms of different types of technologies and protocols. So we use that as our guiding first principle when going into legislation. And also as we think about regulations, that's where, again, these are all nuanced and it's complicated and complex.

stepping back and thinking about what the end game here is and not just how to hit a hammer, hit the nail with a hammer. Actually, that was going to be my next question about the, you know, arrest of the tornado cash developer and just in general, this concept of, you know, whether code is free speech or whatever. Do you see that attitude shifting in a Trump administration? And would this

that same case, again, also perhaps result in some kind of settlement or being unwound in some way? I don't think the Trump campaign spoke directly on that issue, but the president-elect did say a couple of things are really important. One is his commitment to the development of the ecosystem here. And I think by implication that involves the DeFi ecosystem, plus the

payment use cases, as well as the obvious privacy protections that people are entitled to just given the openness of the blockchain. The other thing he said, which is I thought was, from my perspective, actually maybe the most important thing, which was that he was fighting for the right of people to self-custody their crypto assets.

And I think that that is a really critical right. If you if you embrace the idea of a decentralized financial architecture that allows people to have some control over how they custody and move their assets. And again, because of how public the blockchain is and how with analytics, you can often figure out that.

you know, Laura, you or I or Kara or whatever, have belonged to this group or spend our money this way or that way. You have to have a privacy kind of layer around that and the privacy kind of technology around the crypto ecosystem

is still an evolutionary state, but it's a principle that has to be protected and vindicated. And in fact, we held the privacy summit at Coinbase, where our institute put together a really great event just a couple of weeks ago in downtown DC. We drew a lot of good policymakers. And so we're very committed to that issue, even as we look at the kind of current market structure and stablecoin kind of legislation. Our vision is very much of a forward one to the development of

kind of a more decentralized ecosystem and the privacy issues that come with it. So the other thing that I have to ask about is, as I'm sure you're very well aware, polymarket and prediction markets generally became quite the phenomenon in this election. And so much of the post-election commentary has been about how these markets were so much faster in calling the election than the mainstream media.

And obviously, because I'm clued into the crypto community, that's what I'm hearing. But I wondered, you know, for you guys who are more attuned to what DC insiders are saying, you know, how much were they paying attention to these markets and how much credence do you think they give them now? I think people give them a huge amount of credence. I'm curious what Cara thinks.

But remember, all of us in Washington love the political game. So if Poly Markets gives you the answer or you can watch two hours of analysis about election exit poll returns from whatever Wayne County and Detroit, most of us would pick the latter. Even if it's not more accurate, it's more kind of what we do and so what we like. You mean the former? The former.

No, no. I would say a lot of us in D.C. live off of obscure voter data because that's sort of that's why we get into politics. We love that kind of thing. We sort of embrace it. So I wonder whether Washington will be a little late to the party because we just love the game as much as we love the answer at the end of the puzzle. I think there was definitely a

Everybody was watching it, right? The people I interacted with on Capitol Hill, people that I was interacting with downtown, everybody kept an eye on it because I think of just this confusion about what pollsters are doing and if it works. And for the last couple of cycles, it hasn't been as accurate as people may have hoped it would be. So everybody is looking for some sort of information. And yet, again, it's just all part of the puzzle, I think. One kind of common thread I heard was, right, but it's just the crypto.

crypto people who are engaging in those types of markets and what do they know, right? It's just the crypto people. And I think what we discovered is that crypto people have a pretty good sense and a pretty good pulse right now.

Yeah, well, I don't know if you heard the story about the French whale, but he commissioned his own poll. But it was different. He did it differently from how the pollsters did it. He asked he had the he had his pollster ask what people thought who their neighbors were going to vote for. And that's how he ended up making this big bet.

So, yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. You know, he's not even an American, which I find funny. You know, it's just like I think that's why I also kind of didn't know how to take the

how to take those results or not the results, but the market throughout, because I was like, these aren't even Americans. They're probably more crypto leaning, which makes them not representative. Like I couldn't figure it out, but it boils down to when you have money on the line, you want to be right. So, um, all right. So one other thing that I just had to ask about was just generally, I feel like this whole election was like a big vibe shift in so many different directions. Like all these different demographics were changing and,

And, you know, one of the major ones was that Silicon Valley, which has traditionally been aligned with Democrats, really kind of moved more to the Republican column this time. You know, I don't know literally about the entire industry, but obviously some of the bigger names in it, such as Elon Musk, Biden.

Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Sean McGuire, you know, there's just numerous people who publicly came out supporting Trump. And I wondered if you saw this as a permanent shift. Is it some sort of realignment or do you feel that now the Democrats realize they made a mistake and it'll kind of shift back or?

What are the tea leaves you read there? I think it's healthy for the political system. This is not a crypto statement. This is just sort of as an American. I think it's always healthy if every constituent group is potentially gettable by the party that speaks to them in the right way. So I don't think there's ever any permanent political alignments. So

My answer to that question would be no, I don't think anything's permanent. And I think, you know, the Democrats are going to go through a significant soul searching like any party does when they lose a presidential election, and in particular when they lose kind of as resoundingly as happened this time around. And so we'll see where the Democratic Party lands, if they land in a more progressive direction or if they land in a more centrist direction, if they reassess their posture towards business and tech.

I think all of that, it's just too early to tell. But, you know, we'll see what happens. Both parties have appeals to different constituencies. It's just a matter of what prevails. And I think the severity of the attacks on our sector ultimately kind of coalesce people to where the industry landed. But I think it's important to underscore that.

Tech did not, at least the crypto people, did not land on a Republican outcome. A lot of crypto people embraced Trump and Trump embraced the community, which we all are grateful for. But the Harris campaign made some efforts in that regard. Plus, a lot of Democratic candidates stepped up, including a number of the Senate candidates. And so it's very much of a bipartisan thing at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll have to see. Kara, do you have an opinion on this?

whether there's a new realignment or if it'll just... Yeah. So I think that in the long term, these things have a way of shaking out. But ultimately, what we have seen, at least from the crypto industry, is you have a really interesting treasures on both sides. And I know when we look at our giving, when we look at people inside the crypto community, it really does break down about half Republican and about half Democrat.

And I think it's because everybody comes to the table for crypto for different reasons. But ultimately, they all align on this idea of economic freedom, access of principles that align with those really strong progressives and strong conservatives. And so I think in the crypto industry, I don't know if it will. I think it will continue to be bipartisan for the broader technology industry. We'll see. Again, I your guess is as good as mine. Let's ask Polymarket.

Okay. So last quick question. I'm already seeing on Twitter that people are saying that they're going to be moving their companies to the U.S. And I wondered if you had any particular message for these entrepreneurs. We welcome them back to the U.S. I mean, I think it's a great sign. And I think we're here as a policy team to work with Fairshake and Stand With Crypto to take anybody who kind of comes into the U.S. market to

see if they can partner with us in the work that we've been trying to do to take the message to policymakers. So I guess that would be my broad message.

Absolutely. I think that there are lots of opportunities coming in the United States. I think we're about ready to unleash just a tremendous amount of innovation into this country. And I think back to even things like when the App Store came online and think about in 2009, 2010, 2011, if you thought that you would be doing dental monitoring on your iPhone, that didn't exist, right? Yeah.

And now you're just starting to see, again, so many different ways that this technology can be leveraged in a really meaningful way. So that's why I'd say come back, build here, help us demonstrate the value of this technology.

I think, Laura, I think the one thing I was going to say in particular is, you know, you saw Stripe by a stablecoin issuer and you've seen there was a coalition of companies that launched their own stablecoin recently. My guess, and again, it's just a guess on my part, is that we're about on the precipice of a payments, crypto payments revolution with stablecoins and tokenized payments.

And I think that's when, once you start seeing kind of real life use cases that have resonance that people understands and see the speed and the efficiency of it, I think it'll become catalytic of good policy and ultimately broader acceptance and adoption. So it's super exciting. None of us quite know whether the dental applications will be the next big thing or payments, but my guess is payments will be a big one regardless of what else happens.

Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully we won't be lamenting how crypto went the way of 5G and semiconductors in the US. Well, both of you, this has been so fun. And, you know, congratulations, because obviously your efforts have really paid off for the crypto industry. So where can people learn more about each of you and your work?

Well, I mean, we're both on Twitter, and so we're reachable there and on LinkedIn. Stand with crypto. The organization is at StandWithCrypto.org. And anybody who's listening and wants to get involved, they should sign up. It really matters. And hopefully they'll be a part of reaching the four million advocates.

And then our policy team at Coinbase has a landing page at coinbase.com backslash public hyphen policy. And we put content on there. We're trying to refresh the website and we'll have better content going forward. But those are different ways you can find us.

I would also point to the Coinbase Institute that is really working hard to produce primers that are accessible, that as people want to learn more about not only the policy, but the technology. And we just had the conversation about privacy and, for example, just did a privacy primer and accessibility.

A couple of pages, easy to digest. And then if you really want to get into consultations, I think that can also be found there. But 45 pages of consultations might not be the most fun Saturday reading. All right. Well, it has been such a pleasure having you both on Unchained.

Thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining us today to learn more about Faryar and Kara and Fairshake and Stand With Crypto and how well crypto did with these elections. Check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilchard, Wanda Ranovich, Megan Gavis, Pamma Jimdar, and Mark Akaria. Thanks for listening.

Unchained is now a part of the Coindesk Podcast Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out Markets Daily five days a week with host Noelle Atchison. Follow the Coindesk Podcast Network for some of the best shows in crypto.