Hopefully, you’ve seen that the Blockchain Association launched yesterday evening, and the Washington Post called it, “the first fully fledged lobbying group in Washington representing entrepreneurs and investors who are building off the technology behind bitcoin.” As the various articles reinforce, this is a pretty important step for the industry. We’re pleased to be inaugural members. You should read the Association’s launch post.

We’ve made our skepticism of certain crypto projects quite clear at Hangar. But we are decidedly not skeptical of the potential we see in transparent, distributed networks, and the innovative value of new regulatory and legal structures that must be implemented and enabled if these technologies are to exercise their full potential.

With our team’s understanding of policy and politics — and as veterans of the tech policy dramas and debates over the last 15 years — we felt firmly that the industry needed to take immediate steps to reinforce its ability to engage as a sophisticated partner to regulators and policymakers. Coin Center has done astounding work acting as a think tank and advocate for blockchain broadly. It also made it clear that it would be of great use to them to have a partner that unabashedly represents the industry. The previous lack of such an organization made the industry as a whole more vulnerable to misunderstanding and misinformation that resulted in legislation and rulemaking driven by fear instead of smart, thoughtful, forward-looking design. And so it was an easy decision to lend the Hangar team’s expertise building startups to help boot up the Blockchain Association.

In the coming weeks and months, we’ll share more of the Hangar team’s thoughts on crypto, blockchain, policymaking in the industry, and so forth. But today is Blockchain Association’s day.

By bringing together the most thoughtful, reputable, engaged blockchain stakeholders to collectively advocate and educate, as the Blockchain Association is doing, we are making a commitment to work with government to get policy right, to work not just for the organizations that exist today, but those that will come. We think it’s exactly the right approach. As the launch post points out, the Association’s members won’t agree 100% of the time. But there is so much commonality (96%!) that the Association’s staff will have many lifetimes of work to do.

If you operate a company, project, or effort of any sort in the blockchain space, consider joining the Association. The associate membership tier is intended for nascent efforts, allowing the Association to truly represent the ecosystem at its fullest.

We’re grateful to all the members who joined Blockchain Association and all those who will join. We’re grateful to call you a fellow member and a partner. The Blockchain Association launch post has many thank yous at the bottom, and those are all accurate and then some.