As a longtime cryptocurrency skeptic, it may seem strange that I am helping organize the Digital Assets Conference at Duke University on January 20-21. After all, I once wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for a ban on cryptocurrencies. While we continue to believe that unbacked cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin offer no economic utility and impose social costs that far outweigh the benefits, the broader digital asset industry is not going away. I also recognize
Lee Reiners Duke Financial and Economic Center Instructor at Duke Law. At Duke University, he teaches cryptocurrency law and policy and is a frequent media commentator on cryptocurrency regulation. For more information and registration of digital assets on Duke, see: here.
How do I know this? First of all, I have taught and written about cryptocurrencies and digital assets at Duke University for over 6 years. During this time, the sector continuously evolved, subverting all predictions, including mine. This history suggests that those who claim that the ongoing crypto winter is the death knell signal for cryptocurrencies will be proven wrong as well.
I have also spoken to countless Duke students across campus, including students in the groundbreaking Financial Technology Engineering Masters Program who are passionate about digital assets and blockchain technology and want to make it their career. Did. These students aren’t motivated by a desire to make quick money or buy a Lambo. Rather, she finds the subject matter intellectually compelling and sees an opportunity to step onto her ground floor in a nascent industry with great potential.
Finally, I know digital assets will take hold because key figures and companies in the traditional financial system say so.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal last month, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon called it a “promising technology that is already changing how companies raise money and how investors trade stocks. blockchain,” he said. As evidence, he cites Goldman’s use of blockchain in its client-to-client trading platform and its underwriting of a two-year, €100 million digital bond for the European Investment Bank with two other banks. All of these are based on private blockchains.
read more: BlackRock CEO’s Crypto About-Face
Also last month, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, “The next generation of markets, the next generation of securities, will be the tokenization of securities.” We’ve seen some famous examples of tokenization. Last summer, JP Morgan’s Onyx Digital Assets blockchain-based network transferred a tokenized stake in the BlackRock Money Market Fund. In September, private equity giant KKR tokenized shares in feeder funds of the leading KKR Healthcare fund.
These developments may be far from the “pure peer-to-peer version of e-money” envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, but they are not without them. Technology and industry evolve as consumers begin to use products and express their preferences, and as policymakers adjust regulatory frameworks to account for new risks. Despite what many believe to be a new monetary system freed from central banks and traditional financial institutions, cryptocurrencies are destined to evolve and the underlying technology to become obsolete. It was recruited by the same agency that it was supposed to be.
Standing in the ashes of the FTX implosion, now is the time to assess the ongoing evolution of cryptocurrencies and look at potential digital asset use cases that offer real economic utility over the long term. It’s the perfect time for This is why my colleague and I are hosting his Digital Assets on Duke this month.
Digital Assets at Duke is not your typical cryptocurrency conference. No sports cars parked out front, no nightclub after parties, no sales floors selling free goodies. Instead, leveraging Duke’s strengths in interdisciplinary research and industry collaboration, he brings together key players in the digital asset industry, regulatory experts, and select researchers for his two days of rigorous debate and debate. convene.
Perhaps no issue is more important to the future trajectory of digital assets than regulation. At the forefront of this debate, he plans to hear from representatives of two federal agencies. Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce has consistently criticized the agency’s “regulation by enforcement” approach to digital assets and has given developers of decentralized networks a three-year grace period from their registration provisions. We are proposing an innovative safe harbor proposal to provide Federal Securities Law. Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Christine Johnson was a prominent securities and derivatives legal scholar before joining the CFTC in 2022. Johnson has repeatedly called for “a whole-of-government or comprehensive regulatory regime to ensure effective customer protection in digital assets.” market.
Stablecoins are one use case for digital assets that may reduce friction in current payment systems and facilitate new transaction models such as programmable money and micropayments. Our conference will feature speakers from two major stablecoin issuers with different business and regulatory models. Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has a remittance license in most US states, and the company’s management has expressed a desire to become a commercial bank. Circle recently announced a partnership with BlackRock to move his 80% of USDC reserves into a government-only money market mutual fund created by BlackRock. This is a proposal that has drawn the wrath of banking groups. The USDF Consortium has limited consortium membership to FDIC-insured banks, working with Figure to issue tokenized deposits on the Provenance blockchain for his yet-to-be-issued USDF stablecoins. I’m taking a different approach.
The collapse of FTX and other centralized crypto companies over the past year has led crypto advocates to a new call to return to crypto’s decentralized roots and embrace decentralized finance (DeFi). I’m here. As noted in a recent Federal Reserve Bank of New York blog post, “DeFi protocols appear to continue to function as intended in 2022, with no protocols shut down.” , a panel on decentralized exchanges and DeFi applications beyond exchanges, analyzing DeFi’s performance over the past year and DeFi’s future growth potential.
Duke Digital Assets also has panels on tokenization, central bank digital currencies, security and institutional adoption. In summary, the conference brings together people and companies focused on developing, delivering, and regulating the next generation digital asset landscape.
