The post Empire Newsletter: How the US has impacted crypto innovation appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Momentum shift This time last year, the crypto narrative was completely different.  And — while we’re stuck in a weird sideways moment here — there’s no doubt that the market is more positive right now than it was a year ago, when Coinbase and Binance were reeling after the SEC filed lawsuits against both exchanges on consecutive days. Folks were spooked, and rightfully so. We still don’t have as many answers as we might want, but we’re not seeing projects flee to other countries (to the same extent at least, though the three Wells notices served to Consensys, Uniswap and Robinhood have left a bad taste). Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz noted on Empire this week that roughly 37% of the speakers for last year’s Permissionless conference dropped out because they didn’t want to risk stepping on US soil.  Obviously, that’s not as much of a concern anymore, just based on recent industry events such as Consensus. This leads me to one big question: How much damage has been done to crypto and where do we go from here? Bill Hughes, senior counsel at Ethereum studio Consensys, said it’s caused the crypto space to mature “more slowly than it would have otherwise.” “It has stifled innovation from the little guy, who is more concerned with being targeted by the government due to having only modest means, giving larger incumbent crypto firms a competitive advantage, especially ones that are overseas. The anti-crypto types are the same ones who decry competition problems with Big Tech, and undue foreign interests over sectors that are important to the US, yet they try to repeat history with their policy choices,” he continued. Stani Kulechov, CEO of Avara — the company behind the Aave protocol — similarly told Yanowitz that the US “lost a lot of innovation”…

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Filed under: News - @ June 11, 2024 4:28 pm