Dan V

Paul Atkins has been officially nominated to be the next SEC chair, and it's virtually certain he will be confirmed in early 2025. For years now, I've felt like the bearer of an impossible dream. Like I've been carrying the torch for an idea that, although impossible, would be so good we must give it a little brainpower just in case. Many others in the Reserve community must have felt the same. The dream is that one day – maybe – we'll be allowed to bring the world's financial assets into the domain of tokens and smart contracts, providing extreme accessibility in financial markets, innovative structuring of financial arrangements, and liberty to those who want to hold their own assets for themselves. For the past decade, crypto has been mocked for being home only to speculative, meaningless assets. But you know what? We have not been allowed to give the assets meaning and value. The more your crypto asset provides clear economic value to its holder, the more likely you are to get sued. And if you try to register your asset with the SEC, in the unlikely chance your registration is approved, there will be nowhere for it to trade and nobody willing to touch it. On top of that, the thought of existing financial assets like stocks and bonds freely trading on blockchains in the US has been pretty much out of the question. So yeah, crypto has been a cesspool of speculative, often non-sensical assets, but we essentially haven't been allowed to use the technology to transact assets that have straightforward economic value! Today feels different, it doesn't just feel like a dream anymore. What if we will be allowed? For years, the Reserve project has been building and improving the technology for DTFs – like ETFs, but onchain; "decentralized token folios" – with the assumption that all the world's financial assets will eventually be tokenized. That's part of our multi-decade bet that the world might need an alternative to the US dollar within our lifetimes – a nightmare I hope will never come to pass, but can't shake – and our strategy for providing asset-backed currency to offer a backup long before it's needed. We believe that DTFs will, like ETFs, be huge. But just as AMMs like Uniswap are very different from centralized securities exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange, DTFs will be very different from ETFs. AMMs are permissionless, so anyone can list. Assets are in your custody the entire time. DTFs are similar. Anyone can create them, issue them, or redeem them. Your assets are never held by a company that must be trusted, only by a computer program. They can be governed in a transparent, decentralized way, or static and completely ungoverned. We believe that the free market creating any DTFs it wants will, through competition and extreme accessibility, lead to the best stores of value in the world. And we believe that the best stores of value, represented in the form of a token that can be sent to anyone in the world, will make for the best form of money: asset-backed currency. Since February, we've been preparing for a possible window of opportunity during this next administration, getting the pieces in place with the Digital Securities Initiative (digitalsecuritiesinitiative.…) to be ready to work with the SEC in the dream scenario where its leader is in favor of opening this new door. When getting DSI started, I wondered who that new leader under Trump might be, and asked ChatGPT. Paul Atkins was on it's short list, and I thought "huh! that would be cool." He was an advisor to Reserve back at the start, and I knew he was a smart and open-minded person, willing to jump in and work with crypto projects like us. We recently held interviews for DSI's main R&D position within Confusion Capital – the person who would focus full-time on answering sticky questions we need to confront in order to make good regulations around tokenized securities – during the week of the election. We had many great candidates, and upon hearing the results of the election, we decided to hire two instead of one. Now is the time to take this seriously. Now that we know Paul will be the SEC chair, I really feel we have no excuses. We must do the hard work and make the change that the industry and the world needs. We must sort out how digital securities will register with the SEC. We must sort out how crypto exchanges will trade digital securities. We must sort out how companies that wish to issue equities and bonds on blockchains will be allowed to do so. If you are another founder or lawyer out there interested in collaborating on the Digital Securities Initiative, our door is open – it's a multi-organization effort, not something owned by any one company. If you know someone relevant, share this with them. Now is the time. Let's fucking build.