According to recent reports, the state of Wyoming in the United States have agreed to a number of new bills and legislation that have been developed in order to make the state more Bitcoin friendly and more crypto-centric. Officials in the state want to make their area a hub for crypto and blockchain technology and understand that in order to do this, they need to have a set of clear regulations that allow businesses to operate within the industry in a fair and controlled manner.

A new bill, known as SF0125 was approved by the Wyoming House of Representatives last week. SF0125 agrees that digital assets such as cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are property and that therefore, banks in the state are now clear to go ahead and act as crypto custodians for their customers. In short, the bill allows for the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency assets through traditional banking streams It seems that in Wyoming, a huge majority of representatives are clear that blockchain technology is a good thing, with the bill being passed by a vote of 54 to 2. Representatives found little competition against this bill.

More about SF0125

According to Coindesk, there are a number of key factors that stand out within the bill:

“The bill defines a digital asset as a representation of economic, proprietary or access rights that is stored in a computer readable format, and includes digital consumer assets, digital securities and virtual currency.”

The official wording of this is as follows:

“Digital consumer assets are intangible personal property and shall be considered general intangibles, as defined in W.S. 34.1‑9‑102(a)(xlii), only for the purposes of article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, title 34.1, Wyoming statutes.”

Last week, a couple of other bills, namely HB0074 and HB0185 where also passed last week that refer to regulations on security tokens and also refers to some regulations surrounding blockchain based startups within Wyoming. HB0074 respectively is giving new businesses in Wyoming access to special banking services that will allow them to better manage and handle their cryptocurrency:

“HB 0074 creates special purpose depository institutions to serve businesses which may not be able to access traditional banking services, including blockchain businesses.”

Overall this is a very exciting move that really does promise to open up Wyoming to becoming a very blockchain-centric state. The US is generally bullish about Bitcoin, however it looks like Wyoming could be looking to really lead the way with this in teaching its neighbouring states how it’s done.