Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz is decrying the lack of regulatory clarity surrounding the crypto sector in the US.
In a new interview on Thinking Crypto, the CTO says that the manner in which the US government approaches emerging industries stokes fear among those trying to build something new.
“[In] other countries there’s always a possibility that they’ll put new regulations on something new and as well they should. If something new comes out that’s unregulated, reasonable, sensible regulation makes sense. And sometimes in the short term they’ll panic a little bit and say, ‘Let’s just stop this until we can decide what the policy is going to be.’
That’s not what you see in the US. What you see in the United States is just this absolute fear that regulators will turn around and say, ‘You should have realized years ago what you were doing was clearly illegal despite the fact that regulators themselves don’t even know.’”
Schwartz says he worries that if the US continues to create what he views as an unfriendly environment for innovation in the blockchain and crypto sector, those boundary-pushing companies will take their businesses elsewhere, leaving the US behind.
“What I worry about is the United States embraced the internet from a very early day. And if you look at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all the biggest US companies in the past decade have been internet companies and that’s because the US embraced the internet.
And I’m worried that there’s a new technology that could create the next crop of mega companies. You know Coinbase already is probably going to have a $100 billion evaluation, and that’s not the end. And the US is driving these companies offshore. I mean, imagine if the US had driven the internet offshore…
These companies would still exist and they’d still be doing business in the US… Many countries were probably not happy with the fact that the internet could be used to radicalize terrorists, could be used to steal trade secrets, to hack into infrastructure… They’ve all faced a take-it-or-leave-it choice, and pretty much every country has.”
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