🎙 "There is No Political Voice to the Millions of Crypto Users in the US:" Ryan Selkis

In this week’s episode we speak with Ryan Selkis, CEO and founder of Messari, one of the most popular crypto data and research companies. Ryan has been very vocal about crypto regulation in the US. We talk about how he believes the infrastructure bill was a catalyzing event for the whole American crypto ecosystem. He believes while there are think tanks and corporate-led lobbying groups, the space is missing a grassroots entity that gives a voice to the millions of crypto users in the US that so energetically came to life against this bill. That’s why he’s creating a group to help mobilize voters in the crypto community to support pro-crypto candidates.

We go into some of the predictions for 2021 that Ryan made in his end-of-year report. He believes Bitcoin at $100k by the end of the year is still possible, but he believes the more interesting asset is Ethereum. He says that as a consequence, he has increased his eth exposure so that he’s no longer underweight ETH relative to BTC. Ryan also talks about his DeFi investments and how he still can’t quite wrap his head around NFTs.

We also talk about how he got started in crypto by becoming an independent analyst, breaking the biggest story at the time, the Mt. Gox bankruptcy. We go into his transition from investing in DCG, to working on the operations side of CoinDesk and then starting Messari. Finally, we talk about what’s next for the crypto data company, and how it is placing much of its focus on DAOs, to both service these decentralized organizations, and also decentralize parts of Messari itself.

The podcast was led by Camila Russo, and edited by Alp Gasimov. Transcript was edited by Owen Fernau.

🎙Listen to the interview in this week’s podcast episode here:

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Camila Russo: So I definitely want to get to your background and how you got into crypto as I usually do with my guests at the start of the show. But seeing how we have such important news these couple of weeks, and how you've been really outspoken about it, I think it's good to start out with the US Infrastructure Bill that just passed the Senate yesterday. First, I want to bring listeners up to speed on it, if you can just kind of walk us through why this bill is so important to crypto?

Ryan Selkis: Sure. So the quick background is there's a bipartisan infrastructure bill, it's a cornerstone of President Biden's agenda to pass. It's, I think 1.2 trillion in total as part of the spending bill and then this infrastructure component is a sizable piece of that. And there is one provision that was included over the weekend, just a couple weeks ago, that essentially included crypto not as part of the infrastructure bill but as a tax offsets. So how some of these provisions were going to be actually paid for in the broader infrastructure bill, an important component was figuring out what the pay-fors were going to be from different new taxes or new fees, etc.

And one of the areas that the Senate identified was cryptocurrency tax enforcement in the US, which, I don't know how they arrived at that assessment or how they think about scoring that from a budget impact standpoint. But generally speaking, I think most people believe that the way that the language was written and in terms of feasibility of the policy as written, it was just technically unworkable. They had expanded the reporting requirements for crypto brokers, and included such an expansive definition of the term ‘broker’ that it would have basically applied to everybody that's facilitating crypto transactions. It could have been peer-to-peer validators, anyone participating in a proof-of-stake system, any developer that's helping to create and advance protocols that are doing the same in DeFi.

“They had expanded the reporting requirements for crypto brokers, and included such an expansive definition of the term ‘broker’ that it would have basically applied to everybody that's facilitating crypto transactions.”

And there was wholesale industry support for improved language, since scrapping the provisions outright was not really an option because it was a critical component according to the CBO that scored this, again we don't know how, to actually pay for the provisions and spending bill.

So there was an amendment process with two different amendments that emerged over the course of a week that were also bipartisan. And finally, those two parties did reconcile and come forth with an imperfect, but workable amendment that wouldn't completely shut down the US crypto scene. And ultimately, because of the Senate procedures, and how far along the votes already were, it was blocked by a lone Senator, 87 year old senator from Alabama, that objected not because he opposed the provisions that were being put forth, but rather, he wanted to attach a defense spending amendment as a condition for not blocking the otherwise bipartisan amendment that would have fixed some of these really deep problems yesterday.

A lot of folks have been up in arms, justifiably so, about how this has gone down, what it means for the industry. I'll leave a lot of that to the smarter folks on the policy side at Coin Center and Blockchain Association, and folks can kind of follow along with some of the crypto lawyers that have been outspoken about this.

But the long story short is we've got a missing leg of the lobbying stool and DC political machine for crypto right now, and that's a grassroots member-led advocacy organization and lobbying group. We have Coin Center, which is a think tank. We have the Blockchain Association and a couple of other behind the scenes, corporate sponsored, lobbying groups. But there is no voice to the tens of millions of crypto users in the US that, frankly, I don't think the Senate or Congress in general really appreciated until this past week.

“...there is no voice to the tens of millions of crypto users in the US that, frankly, I don't think the Senate or Congress in general really appreciated until this past week.”

And we saw some of that swarm descend on DC virtually, especially on Twitter, thanks to Crypto Twitter, and really, I think those Senators kind of recognized they kicked the hornet's nest. And I think one of the paths forward here as an industry is not to start things from scratch or undermine or do anything but invest more heavily in some of the groups that are working like Coin Center or Blockchain Association.

But we do need to add that kind of third prong of attack, that third leg of the stool to activate some of the more grassroots efforts across the country and in particular focus on primarying or competing with crypto candidates in every level of federal election from here on out. Because the one thing that politicians respond to is whether they get reelected.

“But we do need to add that kind of third prong of attack, that third leg of the stool to activate some of the more grassroots efforts across the country and in particular focus on primarying or competing with crypto candidates in every level of federal election from here on out.”

CR: Okay. So is that why you said you're looking to start this new organization, Digital Freedom Alliance, is that what this additional tool to work on in Washington is about? A more grassroots community-led organization?

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