Today, President Biden issued an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.” The order calls for a holistic approach to crypto across government branches, while also protecting consumers, minimizing volatility, safeguarding national security, and expanding financial inclusion efforts.

Why should we care?
The executive order was met with “relief” by crypto insiders, according to Coindesk. President Biden had the capacity to call for far more stringent regulation of the sector, as may soon be the case in the EU. Instead, the order doesn’t outline any specific policy changes in particular, identifying the haphazard regulatory efforts currently in place as the primary issue facing the crypto space. According to the Biden administration’s approach, the ad hoc nature of current regulations negatively affects consumers, subjecting them to sudden changes in the types of services available to them, and depriving them of crucial information about the longevity of nascent, blockchain-based financial instruments. Crypto startups at present are subject to enforcement by—among others—the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as well as Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which have rolled out regulatory frameworks that often change drastically with little warning. High-yield crypto savings accounts are no longer offered because of these sudden shifts and obscure legal landscapes, for instance. Overall, it remains to be seen if these regulations will have enough teeth to really rein in crypto’s volatility as well as its social and ecological costs. Regulatory coherence is one thing; its content and deployment are another.