What’s important is that regulators are doing their homework and starting to recognize there’s at least potentially something different going on here from what they’re used to seeing. There’s a lot of learning still to come, but light bulbs are quietly going off in different corners of the regulatory world.

Whether you’re in the camp that welcomes regulatory clarity to foster public confidence in this technology or among those in the crypto community who see government engagement as anathema to a system of money originally designed to bypass the state, this emerging regulatory awareness represents a seminal moment.

The race is on

Clearly, many countries taking these steps have their eyes on the potential economic gains generated by the freewheeling ICO market, one that has raised $20 billion so far and which, with $275 billion in (admittedly poorly measured) market capitalization, has come to constitute a significant parallel capital market. There are tax windfalls to be had and there’s the real prize of attracting innovation to their shores.

They need to be careful, though, as this is an exceptionally fleet-footed form of capital. They risk encouraging global “regulatory arbitrage.” When a technology is as geography-agnostic as this, its users will often choose their home base depending on where regulation is lightest, stoking competition among jurisdictions. Given the inordinate number of scammers in the ICO business, the danger is that the worst players gain too much freedom and, by extension, too much influence over how this industry is broadly perceived.

In times past, U.S. regulators could rise above such problems. The sheer amount of money raised in the U.S. left global actors with no option but to comply with their rules just to ensure access to it. But with foreign capital markets deeper in the age of globalization, globally distributed blockchain development teams are deciding that the U.S. just might not be worth it. We are already seeing ICO issuers deciding that they can comfortably raise all they need from Asian investors.

Where this is all pointing, I hope, is to a coordinated international effort to better harmonize the regulatory approach.

Mohanty told me he sees six or so of the world’s more important regulators coming to a broad agreement on utility tokens and on what distinguishes them from payment and security vehicles. There’s a need, for example, to define pressing questions about what level of platform functionality, and when, a token must have to earn exempt utility status. And, beyond the securities laws exemptions, regulators should agree on strategies to apply existing consumer protection laws to ensure that ICO issuers are still held to account for the promises they make to people who put money into their token pre-sales.

Some have forcefully argued that carving out explicit legislative definitions of a utility token – a la Wyoming – overly constrains innovators to those definitions and creates contradictions across jurisdictions. Better to rely on existing laws than to add to the body of legislation, they say. But such concerns should not prevent regulators from creating clearly signaled guidelines to participants in the blockchain development community about how they will apply existing law to different scenarios.

There’s a still a lot of work needed to improve and scale blockchain technology and to foster broad confidence among future buyers of crypto tokens. Best practices among issuers, exchanges and investors/buyers need to be developed. But encouraging the expansion of utility token models is a worthy goal, one that’s much harder to achieve if the burdens of securities laws were to be imposed on all those who create them.

To understand this, one need look no further than the financial inclusion objectives of the Riyadh-based conference that Mohanty spoke at. Organized by the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion under the leadership of Argentina, which holds the G20’s current presidency, the event explored, among other goals, how to encourage entrepreneurship in low-income, developing countries.

If we want the whole world, include enterprising people in such countries, to have access to the powerful economic advantages of decentralized, peer-to-peer applications and business models, regulatory barriers to entry must be softened.

This is, in other words, a cause for humanity.

Sunrise at Lincoln Monument via Shutterstock.