Rep. Don Beyer, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the House and Senate’s joint economic committee, started 2022 like many Americans did — open-minded and curious about the promise of cryptocurrency.
He was by no means a crypto evangelist. When he led a November 2021 hearing on “demystifying crypto” and introduced legislation to regulate the market a few months earlier, he warned of significant risks.
But he also emphasized the goals of promoting innovation and U.S. jobs while giving the market legal certainty.
He thought crypto "may well have a role to play in the financial structure of our country” and so “let’s make sure it’s managed well and regulated well — not over-regulated but protecting people as appropriate.”
Crypto’s very bad 2022 has changed his mind.
“Now, I’m much more bearish about it,” he told MM this week. “We’ve seen the fraud, the disappointment, the crashes. … There’s also a sense that it’s not real, that it is just a mathematical idea. Beyond that, there’s no reality to it.”
Why it matters: Beyer’s shift is another indicator of how the tide in Washington is turning against the digital asset industry, which entered this year with more lobbying and political clout than ever before.
Now, “there’s a lot more skepticism” on Capitol Hill, said Beyer, whose Northern Virginia district lies just outside Washington.
He sees “very little value” in crypto in light of the fact that “governments are moving to digitize their own legitimate currencies.”
Just how bad it got: One of Beyer’s final actions as chair of the Joint Economic Committee is a new report detailing crypto’s failures over the past year, including the market’s $2 trillion slide since last fall.
One risk highlighted in the report is crypto’s uptake by low-income Americans. It challenges the argument made by the industry and even some Democrats that digital currency empowers individuals left behind by the traditional banking system.
