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When it comes to cryptocurrency in the US, the regulatory landscape is rapidly changing. While Regulation is certainly important when it comes to protecting investors and companies,
Jeff Koyen is the President and CEO of 360 Blockchain USA, a subsidiary of 360 Blockchain Inc., a company that trades on the CSE (Canadian Securities Exchange). The company invests in blockchain products with a focus on early-stage opportunities.
We asked Koyen about his company, his views on crypto regulation as a veteran trader and entrepreneur, and his experience using cryptocurrency to purchase a home.
Buying A House With Crypto Proceeds is ”An Absolute Nightmare”
As an individual who has spent several years operating in the crypto space (which is only several years old, to begin with), Koyen has more experience than most with using crypto for “practical” purposes, including one huge endeavor: buying a house with cryptocurrency. Well, not exactly.
“My wife and I are in the process of buying a house using the proceeds of crypto,” he explained. They aren’t using cryptocurrency directly. “You see headlines of people buying mansions with Bitcoin...it’s probably not the case. If you look past the headlines, most of the time they’re just converting Bitcoin to dollars. It’s a pretty traditional transaction.”
“Now, what I’m finding--and I don’t see anyone talking about--is that if you want to finance a house (and we’re not Bitcoin billionaires, so we’re still financing part of our house), doing that is an absolute nightmare. Banks wouldn’t take our money outright, because it came from crypto,” he said. “We’re wrestling with underwriters at the moment.”
This is especially surprising because Koyen’s crypto gains have been in his account for “months, if not years.”
Washington Officials Don’t Understand Crypto Well Enough to Appropriately Regulate It
Koyen went onto say that this experience is one of the things that has “put [him] on the regulatory side,” although he believes that regulation will happen on a state level before the federal government takes any widespread action.
“I think in the short term that we’re going to see states stepping up and sort of ‘planting the flag’ like Wyoming did,” he said, referring to the state’s utility token bill.
However, “at the same time, the federal government will have to wrestle with [crypto regulation] and figure it out,” he said. “I do think there will be federal guidelines of some sort. I’m hopeful that they’ll be on the side of supporting innovation.”
Realistically, though, Koyen believes that the first target of federal crypto regulation will be tokens because “it’s the most easily identifiable and understandable thing” about the crypto space.
“You’ve got a bunch of old white dudes in Washington who have absolutely no understanding of this,” he said. “Even a lot of their advisors and underlings maybe understand it, but they don’t really grasp it. It’s like watching the internet get explained in 1995 by a news anchor. They really don’t understand at all.”
In any case, however, “someone is going to go in and pass something,” and tokens are most likely to be the first thing hit with official federal legislation. Koyen said that this makes him “a little nervous about ICOs, and Ethereum, and Waves, and all the other token-based platforms.”
”We Have to Be Very, Very Careful”
Koyen also said that from his perspective as the President of 360 Blockchain USA, the changing regulatory landscape has “given [the company] pause on certain plans. We started mapping things out a year ago, and even 12 months ago, the ICO world was different...We have to be very, very careful.”
“Even if you do everything right--and we know how to do things right...you can’t promise ROI, you can’t promise gains, you can’t do any of those stupid things. But even then, there’s no guarantee that once you’re ‘out the door,’ [the government] isn’t gonna come knocking for what you did twelve months ago.”
