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Former Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith has spent nearly two months as president of the newly-formed Solana Policy Institute. I caught up with her to get the latest on the Solana and policy front in Washington.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jack: Give the US regulatory outlook a report card grade.
Kristin Smith: I would give it an “A” on the report card. If you look at the past six months, there’s been tremendous progress in undoing the bad policies of the last administration. We’ve seen a turnaround on debanking of crypto companies, we’ve seen the end to the litigation, we’ve seen a pullback on different regulations, like SAB-121, that were preventing new entrants into the crypto space.
So that in and of itself has been incredibly successful. But the fact that we have a “Crypto Week” in Washington next week … it looks like we’re on track to get a stablecoin regulatory framework actually signed into law by President Trump. I think it’s evidence that we’ve come incredibly far in turning around from where we were even just a short six months ago.
Jack: Looking forward into the future, what’s on your wish list on the Solana side of things as you advocate for that ecosystem?
Kristin Smith: One of the things we’ve been doing a lot of thinking on is what changes need to be made, if any, at the regulatory level to ensure that Solana or any other public blockchain can become the home of internet capital markets.
And we’ve gone in to see the SEC and have been submitting some comments on something we’re dubbing as “Project Open,” and basically encouraging [the SEC] to issue statements and guidance and potentially exemptive relief, and consider a time-limited sandbox so that we can get more equities issued onchain.
Jack: Solana is very diverse, and there’s a lot of different visions of what people should build. I know that you guys did a DePIN summit and that’s an exciting, kind of tangential thing. What sector of Solana are you spending most of your time on? Or has the most to gain or lose through engagement with policymakers?
Kristin Smith: It’s a little bit of all the above. The issues around tokenized securities are probably where I’m spending the bulk of my time, but when it comes to basic education of Congress…I would say out of all the use cases, the DePIN use cases are the ones that resonate the most.
It depends on the policymaker we’re trying to find the connection with, but I do think that from a policy perspective, I think the work that we’re doing with Project Open and the SEC, and trying to find the best way to help make the internet capital markets a reality, from a regulatory perspective, is probably one of the more meaningful things we could do.
But you know, that’s not a message that really resonates with your rank-and-file member of Congress who’s just trying to understand what a blockchain is. Something like DePIN is better in that context.
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