A group at the forefront of advocacy for the digital assets industry released a report on Tuesday outlining policy objectives for supporting the blockchain industry.
The Digital Chamber’s “U.S. Blockchain Roadmap” features six pillars for how digital assets can be used to put the U.S. in a leadership role for blockchain technology while strengthening the economy and financial system.
“This is not just about making the U.S. the leader in blockchain technology, it’s also recognizing that blockchain is an advanced technology and its potential benefits,” Perianne Boring, founder and chair of The Digital Chamber, told FOX Business in an interview. “This technology can bring real benefits to the U.S. economic and financial system if we do this correctly.”
The roadmap includes a call for the enactment of the BITCOIN Act, which would establish a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve to help shore up the federal balance sheet, as well as promote the use of stablecoins based on the U.S. dollar and create bitcoin-backed Treasury securities.
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Boring and The Digital Chamber recommended that the bitcoin reserve be separated from other cryptocurrencies that President Donald Trump has suggested, including in a reserve alongside bitcoin, arguing that the crypto assets serve different functions.
“It’s important to recognize that these other cryptocurrencies, they’re very different than bitcoin, they’re not digital gold,” Boring said. “Most of them are smart contract networks, they’re an open source platform to create decentralized applications, so that’s a very, very different use case than digital gold.”
“We’re calling to separate those two things out – you have bitcoin in its own separate fund for its own separate use, where the crypto fund would be for research and development, because you need access to these cryptocurrencies to be able to innovate, build, develop on the networks,” Boring said.
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The Digital Chamber added that the research and development fund would enable the use of those digital platforms to help monitor federal spending in real time and streamline other government processes.
“One of the things that I’ve felt pretty strongly about is that government spending should be put on a blockchain, on an unalterable, 100% verifiable, publicly auditable ledger, so you can track the spending a lot more efficiently and use that to prevent fraud and abuse in the future,” Boring said.
“We’re calling for a research and development fund where the government should be studying the benefits of blockchain infrastructure for the use of different types of government programs, and I think DOGE is a great example, but there’s probably many others.”
Congress is expected to work on developing market structure legislation that would create and clarify regulatory frameworks for digital assets in the near future, and The Digital Chamber’s roadmap highlighted three key areas to establish clarity for the industry.
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These include establishing clear jurisdictional boundaries between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over digital assets; developing a self-regulatory organization for digital assets to coordinate with federal regulators; and establishing guidelines for tokenized assets in capital markets, real estate and corporate finance to spur investment and adoption.
In the time since The Digital Chamber’s last blockchain action plan was released in 2019, Boring said that the importance of keeping blockchain networks open source and free of censorship to promote financial freedom and decentralization is one area of digital assets policy that has emerged in importance since then.
“It’s really important as we’re building out blockchain infrastructure that we’re not jeopardizing the integrity of blockchain networks,” she explained. “These are open-source, decentralized software networks. So any attempt to infringe on that open-source nature will not only jeopardize the integrity of these networks, like the security of them, but it also can infringe on the constitutional rights of Americans.”
“There have been attempts to try to censor blockchain networks or to put different types of regulatory and compliance obligations on the technology itself that would essentially make it illegal to use these technologies here in the U.S.,” Boring said.
Other components of The Digital Chamber’s recommendations include protecting and fostering bitcoin mining in the U.S., which it argues helps strengthen the resiliency of the electric grid, as well as modernizing the banking system to more easily include digital assets.
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