By Solomon Odunayo
Stu Alderoty, the Ripple General Counsel, has recently posited that the United States is dangerously close to losing global edge in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, as its hostile regulatory atmosphere close to pushing innovators out of the country.
Recall that Ripple, the US-based cross-border payment firm, has threatened to move its headquarters away from the country if its regulatory climate remains hostile to its major payment tools, such as the digital token XRP.
In a new interview on The Ripple Drop, Alderoty cited the tough stance of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) towards digital assets, especially the fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, XRP. He sees this tough stance as a discouragement for innovators that intend to leverage the nascent industry.
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He also mentioned that the United States should handle the crypto-asset industry and blockchain technology the way the internet was handled in its early days.
He said:
“The risk of what’s going to happen [is] innovation in this space will not develop robustly in the US. Because if I’m a young innovator and I’m looking at the US regulatory landscape and I’m not really sure whether what I’m about to do is going to be considered good or bad, I probably say, ‘I don’t even want to start my project.’ So I never even start the innovation.
“The other risk is, I take it and I say, ‘You know what? I’m going to go to Singapore. I’m going to go to Japan. I’m going to go to Switzerland. I’m going to go to the UK and I’m going to build my innovation there.
“Think about the mid-1990s when this thing called the internet started. Nobody knew how big it was going to get. Nobody knew its use cases. At the time, people said people are using it for either child pornography or they were using to have secret messages so they can engage in illicit activities
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“But the US government basically said, ‘Look, this is a really new technology. We don’t understand it, but it seems to have this tremendous promise. So again, what we’re going to do is we’re going to allow this thing to flourish.
“We’re not going to not allow it to flourish in a way that’s really damaging. But we’re going to allow the innovation to flourish and not be suffocated by the regulation.’ And then look what we have. The US clearly is the leader in all things internet for the past 30 years.
“And I think we are dangerously close in the US to losing that opportunity when it comes to blockchain technology and digital assets technology. And we’re going to potentially forgo it, if we haven’t already, to these other jurisdictions.”