President Biden recently issued his sweeping
economic report, in which the administration’s Council of Economic Advisers addressed numerous economic policy concerns, including the current crypto ecosystem and the perceived appeal of crypto assets. The report discussed claims made about the purported benefits of crypto assets, such as the decentralized custody and control of money, as well as the potential for “improving payment systems, increasing financial inclusion, and creating mechanisms for the distribution of intellectual property and financial value that bypass intermediaries that extract value from both the provider and recipient,” but argued that “[s]o far, crypto assets have brought none of these benefits.” The report countered that, in fact, “crypto assets to date do not appear to offer investments with any fundamental value, nor do they act as an effective alternative to fiat money, improve financial inclusion, or make payments more efficient; instead, their innovation has been mostly about creating artificial scarcity in order to support crypto assets’ prices—and many of them have no fundamental value.”
Arguing that these issues raise questions about the role of regulations in protecting consumers, investors, and the financial system on a whole, the report conceded that some of the potential benefits of crypto assets —including (i) serving as investment vehicles; (ii) offering money-like functions without having to rely on a single authority; (iii) enabling fast digital payments; (iv) improving the underbanked population’s access to financial services; and (v) improving the current financial technology infrastructure through distributed ledger technology—may be realized down the road. However, the report cautioned that “[m]any prominent technologists have noted that distributed ledgers are either not particularly novel or useful or they are being used in applications where existing alternatives are far superior.” Highlighting the risks and costs of crypto assets, the report asserted, among other things, that cryptocurrencies are not as effective as a medium of exchange and do not serve “as an effective alternative to the U.S. dollar” due to their use as both money and an investment vehicle.
