On December 6, Congress reached a bipartisan agreement on the amended 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDA Act) which the Senate passed on December 15. The document stretches to several thousand pages and includes 16 pages outlining a National Strategy for the research and development of distributed ledger technology (DLT). The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will be responsible for developing the strategy. In fact, the OSTP isn’t part of the Department of Defense as it sits within the Office of the President.
Despite the government’s desire to reign in the cryptocurrency sector, the research explicitly includes applications on public and permissionless blockchains.
The legislation shows more than a passing resemblance to a separate bill introduced in May by Republican Senators Roger Wickers and Cynthia Lummis, which called for a national strategy. Lummis is a vocal cryptocurrency supporter and one of the architects of one of the most promising digital asset bills, the Lummis-Gillibrand Responsible Financial Innovation Act.
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