Over the past year, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS), led by Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky, has been attempting to create a set of regulations for virtual currency services. They called this set of regulations the “Bitlicense.”
I have been following this issue closely and participated in public testimony before the DFS back in January 2014 that was a precursor to creating these new regulations.
While these regulations will only apply to businesses operating in New York State, they will naturally be a precedent for many other states who seek to regulate virtual currency services and as such, we should consider them a potential framework for all state regulation of virtual currency.
The initial proposed Bitlicense regulations were published last year and were subject to a comment period which produced more than 3,700 total comments. The DFS did an excellent job of working through those comments and came back with a revised Bitlicense draft early this year. The comment period for the revised Bitlicense started in late February and will end this friday, March 27th.
This blog post is being submitted as a public comment on the revised Bitlicense regulations and should be read as such.
While the DFS has taken great care to simplify the Bitlicense regulations and reduce the scope of them, there remain two fundamental and important problems with them, both relating to duplication of existing regulatory requirements.
Before I get into the specific issues around unnecessary duplication in the proposed Bitlicense regulations, I would like to speak about the issue of regulation and startups and high growth companies in general.
I believe startups and high growth companies are important to the US economy and US citizens for many reasons, but primarily because they bring important new technologies into our lives and improve them, and because they are engines of economic growth and jobs.
Startups and high growth companies should be required to comply with all existing laws and regulations. They should not be excluded from the laws that apply to all other businesses. However the arrival of new technologies should always be seen as an opportunity to review and update our laws and regulations in accordance with the benefits and challenges brought by these new technologies.
It is also true that startups and high growth businesses often start with a very small base of employees and capital and they cannot afford the compliance and regulatory affairs teams of much larger companies. Because of this, startups and high growth companies are more heavily “taxed” in their efforts to comply with regulations and we should be mindful of this “tax on innovation” that regulations place on the startup sector and high growth companies in general.
Duplicative regulatory requirements are a particularly harmful form of this regulatory burden. If one regulatory body is responsible for making sure that businesses comply with the rules, we should not force companies to comply with a redundant and duplicative set of rules and compliance requirements. This is particularly true of state regulations as duplicative compliance requirements could, at the extreme, require companies to do the same thing 50 times (once for every state). And small high growth companies are the ones who will feel the pain of this duplicative and redundant regulatory burden the most.
So, it is with that backdrop that I wish to highlight two such duplicative and redundant regulatory requirements in the Bitlicense. The first are the anti money laundering (AML) requirements in the Bitlicense regulations. Virtual currency exchangers and administrators are already required to comply with federal AML regulations. In many ways this is a good thing. FinCEN (the federal money laundering regulator) set a clear federal standard for all bitcoin companies in March 2013. New York State and all other states should require these virtual currency businesses operating in their jurisdiction to comply with the federal AML regulations but they should not require duplicative and redundant AML compliance on a state by state basis.
The second duplicative and redundant provision in the Bitlicense is related to state money transmission regulations, which are already in place and are applicable to all virtual currency businesses. The Bitlicense requires similar provisions to what is already in place for money transmitters under state regulations, thus creating duplicative and redundant compliance obligations, which, again, could end up being replicated in all fifty states around the country. A better construct would be to exempt licensed money transmitters authorized by the DFS to engage in virtual currency business activity, just as the BitLicense has done for entities chartered under NY Banking Law.
The New York State Department of Financial Services has made a commendable effort to understand the risks posed by virtual currency and to construct regulations to protect society from them. There has been a lot of great work done in this effort. And it is particularly helpful to the startups and high growth companies operating in the virtual currency sector to know what is expected of them to operate legally and safely. I believe if the DFS addresses these two duplicative and redundant provisions, we will have a much better and more efficient regulatory structure for virtual currency providers and that will be a very good thing for all involved.
