According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, in May, Andreessen Horowitz held a conference on the regulation of cryptocurrencies within the US economy. The event, called the Crypto Regulatory Summit, was attended by officials from the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as other regulatory bodies.
The main purpose of this summit was to try to persuade Washington officials to loosen their grip in terms of regulation in the cryptocurrency industry. The major problem is money laundering, which is something that still needs to be addressed.
Andreessen Horowitz is a US venture capital firm and is worth about $4 billion. It was founded in 2009 by Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen and in recent years has invested heavily in the blockchain and cryptocurrency market.
Marc Andreessen himself, during the summit, talked about how important regulation is in this area and how blockchain technology, alongside crypto, can be tailored to provide a system of online payments and a range of investments, just as Andreessen Horowitz is doing:
“Eighty percent of the things people hate about the internet today would not be problems”.
The comparison that the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz has expressed, has already been often discussed in the past. Marc thinks that cryptocurrencies are like the Internet in its infancy and that the best part will come thanks to regulations.
“It was not obvious that it would make sense to have these online businesses. It was not obvious that the use cases were going to have consumer demand. It was not obvious that you were going to be able to secure it. It was not obvious that there would ever be a business model behind it. All that actually had to get invented”.
Facebook‘s entry into the crypto market has prompted all regulators to work hard, placing cryptocurrencies at the centre of attention. The growing tension between Libra, Facebook’s cryptocurrency, and the regulatory agencies is worrisome for other projects. Andreessen himself has long been a member of Facebook’s board of directors.
