Yesterday the White House published the President’s Economic Report, which featured a 30-page chapter on digital assets presenting a highly critical view of the sector and technology. That particularly relates to cryptocurrencies but also the use of blockchain technology in general. Unsurprisingly, it was more upbeat about central bank digital currency (CBDC) but particularly the new FedNow payments system to be launched shortly.
The paper presents the ‘claimed’ benefits of digital assets and blockchain technology but proceeds to debunk each one. It went far beyond painting cryptocurrencies as speculative.
The conclusion states, “it is possible that their underlying technology may still find productive uses in the future as companies and governments continue to experiment with DLT.” While that sounds like a guarded but upbeat assessment, the body of the chapter is anything but. There are statements like “many prominent technologists have noted that distributed ledgers are either not particularly novel or useful or they are being used in applications where existing alternatives are far superior.”
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