A Citizen's Guide to Driving Blockchain Policy | Jeet Raut - PiSquared

Welcome back everybody. More policy talk. This is my favorite track and I am so excited to for our next uh discussion here, a citizen's guide to driving blockchain policy by G route who is the executive director of the New York Blockchain Council.

Thank you so much. Uh hello everyone. Uh my name is G Trout. Um most of my time uh I spend as the head of BDN strategy at Pi Squared. We're building out the world's fastest agentic payment system.

If you're interested about that, please find me afterwards. But uh here today, I'm here to uh discuss basically a citizens guide to driving blockchain policy. Um I'm the executive director and founder of the New York Blockchain Council. We got founded in November of 2024. So why this matters now, right?

The last panel did a really great job kind of highlighting what's happening with the Clarity Act. Uh we recently had the Genius Act passed last year and that'll be going into effect next year. So the OC is figuring out some of the compliance and regulatory guidelines around that. At the state level, there's more than 30 bills that are currently being worked on right now. And as a whole, uh crypto is a $2 trillion industry and there's a lot of interest in seeing how it will grow.

um referencing uh you know I'm just a bill Capitol Hill again right so in terms of legislation actually becoming policy uh the processes are these um you start by first drafting legislation uh it then goes to committee committee is often where a lot of legislation uh ends up unfortunately going away or it gets amended to oblivion so committee is incredibly important then you have the floor vote where everyone will vote on the bill itself then going to the other chambered and then finally signed in by a governor or the president at either the state or federal level. But this is where it really becomes important for all of us uh in the space to really advocate for the space itself. Um citizens all of us can actually be uh an important part of each one of these steps and I and I do recommend folks get more involved as time goes on. So who are the key players? You have the legislators who are the elected officials, right?

These are your representatives. Um you have the regulators, the SEC, CFTC, OC, um industry groups such as ourselves at a state level. Um we're a trade association and then also lobbying groups such as the blockchain association, Coin Center, uh digital chamber of commerce and so on. And finally, and most importantly, it's all of us because all of us as citizens can actually impact each one of these other groups and actually get the policies we want going forward. And so when we talk to policy makers about what we are as an organization or as an industry, it's really important that we kind of speak their language.

Um the average elected official is not really going to care about decentralization or tokens or like consensus mechanisms. However, they do care about things like jobs in the jurisdictions. Um collecting massive amounts of tax revenue. So if everyone hopefully uh here is signed up with stand with crypto is involved with their local uh stand with crypto either city or state uh group and uh can really work with them to follow up on uh different ways to interact with policy makers. So at a local level right all of us now things that you can do attend town halls talk a bit about how the technology can yet again benefit the citizens in those jurisdictions.

Uh meet meet your local representatives and kind of talk about how they can benefit and and also you know like again speaking their language like I was saying on the last slide and finally um something we do a lot of in New York is hosting uh educational events. So some of that is around just you know explaining what some of the benefits of uh blockchain are to legislators and policy makers and yet again just uh getting a lot of folks out to show that also there is a large community of people who are really interested in the space at a state level. um you can get associated or become a member of a group such as ourselves like the New York blockchain council um testifying on committee hearings right we see a lot of uh leaders in the space doing that today as well as proposing model legislation we're one state however there are two groups one is the um US blockchain council as well as the North American Blockchain Association so each one of us as a states is part of these larger groups and it's nice because we can communicate our different strategy or in different bills that we have up for legislation and actually learn from each other and really drive policy together very quickly. Finally, at the federal level, right, reaching out to your um senators, um participating in public comments, and then finally supporting larger groups such as lobbying groups like the blockchain association and coin center for ourselves, right? Um I'm just someone who was in the space for a long time.

I've worked at different uh L1's uh on the infra side, founded my own last year, working on a new type of protocol right now. But I was someone that realized that I really did want to get involved in policy because uh it's really easy to get a lot of like smear campaigns when you start reading about like blockchain and crypto in the news. You know, it's heavily um kind of biased in a lot of ways. And I realized that I wanted to do something as an individual um who's worked in the space but actually knows it well enough can can hopefully communicate the benefits of it to larger uh legislators as a whole. So our general policy or framework that we use um at the blockchain council in New York is basically doing three things.

One educating legislators and policy makers. Two um awareness. So when we say awareness uh we primarily tie that around events. So, we worked with Chain Link last fall to host the New York blockchain week. We had uh you know, they had SmartCon, their main large event, and we had another 30 or 40 events on the side, which was great because we could pull from the local community and companies to really have a robust week of programming.

And finally, policy itself. So, um I'll be honing up to uh Albany in the next uh few weeks here, speak to local lawmakers and talk about how yet again um they can benefit a lot from the space. So yeah, that's uh kind of what we do. Um this is a quick primer. If you have any questions, please uh reach out to me.

Um you can follow me on X. I'm just G route. Um and yeah, thank you guys so much for your time.