Following a year of intense highs and lows in the crypto market, March 2022 saw speculation intensify around a White House Executive Order (EO) that was supposedly imminent. President Biden signed the document on Wednesday, March 9th, in what many viewed as a potential watershed moment for the industry. However, legislative upheaval is a meticulous process, and months down the line there is still a degree of uncertainty around the order’s eventual consequences. This article will assess where the process is up to, and what it means from the perspective of regulatory compliance.
Crypto Executive Order: Why Now?
The first thing to acknowledge is that March’s EO was by no means an exhaustive dossier of rules and regulations that crypto firms must now abide by. On the contrary, it contained more questions than it did answers. This was unsurprising to many, as although he was expected to “lay out his administration’s game plan”, President Biden, conversely, wasn’t expected to delve into any specific proposals.
The EO ‘calls for measures’ to fulfil a number of specific objectives, rather than stipulating what those measures should actually be. These objectives include developing policy recommendations to protect US consumers, investors and businesses, and researching the potential for a United States Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), among many others.
One constant throughout is that the language is more exploratory than definitive; the administration appears to be asking for Government departments to put their heads together to develop the best possible solution for a relatively novel challenging proposition. While this may appear logical in many ways, it has been viewed as disorganized and lacking in authority in some quarters, with Fox stating that there are ‘a lot of cooks in the kitchen’. In addition, it has been accused of containing ‘little new information’.
What it has certainly done is bought some time, establishing a greater level of control over firms that should now second-guess their own conduct given that it is now under greater scrutiny and that a line in the sand appears to have been drawn by the administration.
What’s in the Executive Order?
The document was essentially a mandate for a variety of relevant…
