There are various policy and regulatory review processes occurring globally, that are examining crypto regulations.
It would be good to have a voice in these regulatory discussions to make sure crypto is properly understood and approached by regulators.
I’m a former policy analyst, consultant and academic with a phd in political science.
I’m interested in doing some government relations work and contributions to policy review processes. such as participating in stakeholder consultations, responding to issues papers and calls for submissions on proposed regulations.
My proposal is to begin to operate as a government relations manager on behalf of Bankless. This would involve convening a panel of interested members from the DAO as a steering committee/sounding board for this work.
A big risk to crypto is being over regulated in a way that is similar to a corporation.
I am interested in developing some advocacy based around the following points:
- web 3.0 economic relations better parallel conventional economic relations i.e. they enable property rights online. Web 2.0 is not built around property rights so extracts value behind the back of the consumer in manipulative ways.
- web 3.0 is about setting up online economies and not corporations so it would be a mistake to regulate web 3.0 organisations like corporations. Tokens are not shares but rather incentivise behaviour on the platform and enable governance coordination but do not constitute ownership of web 3.0 platforms. People can own the resources they bring onto the platform but do not own the platform itself.
- Web 3.0 platforms can be set up with different incentives ranging from incentives to profit, to incentives to protect the environment to incentives to work, to incentives to value things other than profit such as creativity. We are only at the beginning of experiments in setting up a variety of incentives on web 3.0 platforms. To regulate Web 3.0 platforms as corporations would be to turn them into corporations that can only incentivise a narrow range of things and would stifle creativity.
- there are significant geo-political advantages to fostering web 3.0
- there are also generational, business cycle and equity arguments to be made in favour of defi.
I would discourage advocacy around sound money memes and libertarian approaches to understanding crypto currency because given my academic background and understanding of central banking I do not find them convincing. These arguments are unlikely to be convincing to regulators and they are a double edged sword because ultimately value has a hermeneutic quality. Whether people argue it is better placed in bitcoin or USD, value depends on whether the medium it is placed in can facilitate the movement, storage and growth of value which is as much determined by the economy that surrounds the medium and beliefs and expectations, as it is in the medium itself.
I’m thinking that a budget of 10,000 bank each month that the position is active (some months there might not be any work to do) would be appropriate.