Why Are US-Based Digital Asset Businesses Looking to Launch Overseas?

July 16, 2019

Bill Taylor, Chief Investment Officer, Fintek Capital LLC, discusses why the United States is struggling to keep up with smaller international jurisdictions in regulating digital assets. Bill highlights Facebook’s Libra Network as a prime example.

Note: this video was filmed on May 21st, a few weeks prior to the release of the Libra Whitepaper.

Transcript

Dara Albright: Do you see more US-based companies launching funds overseas?

Bill Taylor: Oh, absolutely. And they're doing it not because they want to, but because they're being forced to go to other jurisdictions. If you want to be fully regulated, and most funds do, and fully compliant, you want to go where you can get it done and be in a regulated environment and not sitting and waiting for the rules to come about. So, yes, there's going to be more and more. Only recently, a great example, Facebook is going to do a cryptocurrency or a currency within Facebook that it can market toward payments to use on its WhatsApp.

All of these different things it can do. Ironically, just this week, Facebook also announced that it was setting up a brand new, I think it's Libra, network in Switzerland to process payments, investing and all the things that its cryptocurrency is going to do. Ironically, again, Facebook’s code name for its cryptocurrency is Libra, and the new offshore account in Switzerland is Libra Networks. So, yes, if Facebook does something like that, you're going to see many more. Amazon would probably do the same thing. It doesn’t want to go out there; the regulatory thing. If it wants to stay in front and be a market leader, it’s going to have to go somewhere where it can get things done and operate now—not at X time in the future. It’s being forced out, not because it wants to, but because other jurisdictions are far ahead of the U.S. regulations and how they treat the same type of assets, and it's forcing people to go overseas.

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