Joe Biden’s administration plans to issue an executive order that will ask federal agencies to regulate digital assets “as a matter of national security.”
The prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum and NFT have been highly volatile over the past year. Bitcoin went from being worth almost US$70,000 at the end of last year to losing as much as US$37,000. Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, experienced similar changes, while the NFT market grew from almost US$41 billion in 2021.
In the face of this market, Joe Biden’s US administration plans to issue an executive order that will ask federal agencies to regulate digital assets “as a matter of national security”, according to reports.
“This is designed to look holistically at digital assets and develop a set of policies that give coherence to what the government is trying to do in this space,” a White House source said, adding, “Because digital assets don’t stay in one country, you need to work with other countries on synchronization.”
The executive order would involve the White House National Security Council, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers.
The cryptocurrency market soared from US$200 billion in January 2020 to more than US$1.5 trillion today, as people around the world buy cryptocurrencies as the potential future of finance.
Meanwhile, NFTs (non fungible tokens), digital certificates based largely on the ethereum blockchain, have been embraced by the art and sports worlds as a lucrative new source of revenue. Not to mention the recent metaverse industry.
The metaverse, the new social interaction, has taken center stage in recent months and became especially relevant when the pandemic forced us to digitize our routine from one day to the next. The big technology players are competing to be the first to create a centralized platform where internet users can spend their time, interact with each other, play, learn, trade and even work.
Now, the Biden administration aims to issue an executive order that will call on federal agencies to regulate digital assets.
