Policy Lab | Paradigm Policy

Looking Back / Looking Forward

A personal reflection on working at the intersection of crypto and policy

August 27, 2024

July 2024 Democratic Public Opinion Poll

Democratic voters are increasingly gravitating towards crypto. That’s the primary takeaway of our new poll of registered Democrats, the complement to our poll of Republicans from June. These results dovetail with recent reports that Democratic candidates for office and Members of Congress are becoming pro-crypto, indicating that political figures are following the lead of their voters.

August 12, 2024

June 2024 Republican Public Opinion Poll

In June, Paradigm conducted a first-of-its kind poll of Republican voters to better understand how they think about crypto. The results were clear: Republicans embrace financial freedom and want the current Administration’s crypto approach to end.

July 10, 2024

Policy Lab RH-001: Settling the Unsettled

Paradigm Policy Lab-funded research argues that public blockchains can be used to settle financial transactions, stressing the importance of developing proactive and multi-faceted solutions to settlement vulnerabilities before a “black swan” scenario occurs.

June 13, 2024

The Edges of Finance

Some parts of crypto seem alien when compared to traditional finance. They make more sense when you view them in the context of a broader shift away from banks toward digital financial services provided by a range of people and companies. Innovation in finance is moving from the core to the edges.

May 23, 2024

Crypto's Biggest Skeptics are EVM-pilled

Central banks love to publicly question crypto. And yet their use of crypto technology tells a much different story: central bank future-of-finance efforts increasingly leverage crypto Open Source Software (OSS).

April 1, 2024

March 2024 Public Opinion Poll

Key findings about American voters use of crypto and the importance of this growing voting bloc

March 14, 2024

You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand (2.0)

The recent SEC Inspector General report highlighted the impact that limiting crypto ownership has had on the SEC’s hiring efficacy. In light of this, Paradigm Policy revisited and revised our suggested updates to government ethics rules.

November 8, 2023

Electronification, trading, and crypto

An analysis of the historical evolution of financial markets — and why crypto is about more than just making existing processes digital.

September 6, 2023

The Future of Payments Includes Stablecoins

Any legislation on stablecoins should promote openness and competition while recognizing that stablecoins are inherently different from bank deposits and MMFs

July 26, 2023

Joining Paradigm · Government Affairs Lead · Alex Grieve

July 17, 2023

Moneyness In The Digital Age

The recent events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) provide a lens for reexamining age-old questions about the relationship between money and credit — and crypto’s important role in the future.

April 26, 2023

SEC’s Path to Registration - Part III

The Current SEC Disclosure Framework Is Unfit for Crypto

The grand bargain of the US securities laws is that any issuer selling securities to the general public must provide the public with a set of disclosures approved by the SEC. These laws are intended to address information asymmetry and ensure that the investing public has the material information necessary to make informed investment decisions. The securities laws are not intended to turn the SEC into a gatekeeper or “merit regulator” that itself decides which projects are investable and which are not. Congress meant for discretion to remain solidly in the hands of individual investors.

April 20, 2023

March 2023 Public Opinion Poll

While Washington sits on the sidelines, Americans want regulatory clarity on crypto. That's the bottom line on a poll we recently conducted to better understand how Americans view crypto.

March 24, 2023

SEC’s Path to Registration - Part II

Lessons from Crypto Projects’ Failed Attempts to Register with the SEC

The grand bargain of the US securities laws is that any issuer selling securities to the general public must provide the public with a set of disclosures approved by the SEC. These laws are intended to address information asymmetry and ensure that the investing public has the material information necessary to make informed investment decisions. The securities laws are not intended to turn the SEC into a gatekeeper or “merit regulator” that itself decides which projects are investable and which are not. Congress meant for discretion to remain solidly in the hands of individual investors.

March 23, 2023

SEC’s Path to Registration - Part I

Due to SEC Inaction, Registration is Not a Viable Path for Crypto Projects

SEC Chair Gary Gensler would like the American public to believe that it is just as simple and easy for crypto founders to register tokens or crypto products with the SEC. It’s not.

March 23, 2023

You Can't Regulate What You Can't Understand: The Case for Modernizing Government Ethics Rules

The tl;dr is that ethics rules effectively bar most government employees from owning crypto.

February 21, 2023

Using On-Chain Data for Policy Research, Part 3: Mint/Burn Dashboard

Today, fiat-backed stablecoins are an important part of the crypto ecosystem and looking closely at on-chain data can surface issues that lead to better-designed stablecoins. Rather than write an academic-style report, our approach here is to make available a clean data set and deliver an interactive data dashboard to encourage more individual use and exploration of on-chain activity.

February 16, 2023

Using On-Chain Data for Policy Research, Part 2: Stablecoin Risk Rundown

The first post in this series provided an overview of one of the many ways to access on-chain data for use in policy research. This piece builds on that work by introducing a set of policy issues relevant to stablecoins, including what can and can't be probed using on-chain data. It also covers a few practical steps related to data cleaning. It is intended for policy professionals operating at the academic-practitioner frontier.

January 19, 2023

Introducing Paradigm’s Policy Council

We are excited to announce the first iteration of the Paradigm Policy Council, an impressive group of bipartisan talent with a diverse set of experiences. This team will advise Paradigm’s leadership team and help us tell the story of Web3 in Washington and around the world.

November 7, 2022

Using On-Chain Data for Policy Research: Part 1

Crypto policy work rarely involves real, granular data. This is a missed opportunity, given how many tools used by the modern economics and finance community should directly translate to crypto data analysis. Crypto offers granular data, available to anyone, by design.

October 13, 2022