Over the last year we have spoken to multiple law firms about regulatory compliance and the Sweetbridge protocols. When I have suggested going to meet the SEC the repeated comment from lawyers and other project founders has been, “We don’t recommend talking to the SEC directly. Let lawyers talk to them for you on a ‘no name’ basis.” Now understand, I was not talking about going alone I was talking about going with our lawyers.

The advice not to talk to the SEC directly always left me feeling a bit uncomfortable — who better to explain our project than those creating the project? We want to be compliant with regulation, and we have talked to regulators in many other countries and have generally found them interested in discussing our project and how we might address any of their concerns. We found that they wanted to understand our business model and how blockchain enabled us to do things we could not do before.

At the beginning of this year we asked our current law firm in the U.S. to set up an appointment with the SEC and we said we want to attend with you and talk to them directly. We had talked to multiple other regulatory bodies, congressional staffers and members of Congress. They mostly recommended that we talk to the SEC and we wanted to follow their advice because it made sense.

Last week we finally got the chance to talk to the SEC about our project, at our request. We needed to decide whether to include the U.S. in our token sale and product launch. We were not going to launch our general token sale until our product was ready to use. We wanted clarity, and hoped the meeting might bring some. Even if the answer was “We think all tokens are securities or you can’t do that in the U.S.,” that answer would be clear.

Going into the meeting we had hoped that we could talk about the business model and how tokens enabled our business model. We had prepared a presentation that was on these topics not on our coin designs or the law and we wanted to get advice on how we could do this in the U.S. Our lawyers had sent a briefing on the tokens design and legal opinions earlier.

We found ourselves in a room with seven SEC lawyers plus several on the phone which we took as a good sign. We were thrilled when the opening comments from the SEC was a request that we talk about our business model.

We were able to explain to everyone in the room how our business model used the blockchain to do something you can’t do today. We were able to explain that the ability to reconcile the existing world’s accounting records, legal status, and financial payment with reality in one atomic transaction was a game changer enabling our protocols to cut substantial cost and layers out of our market. The blockchain literally allowed us to do what otherwise would seem impossible.

We also had a chance to explain to them that without Bridgecoin and Sweetcoin — without a stable, cash-equivalent token pegged to existing fiat currencies, and a discount token offering incentives for network adoption and aligning the interests of employees and customers — our economic model cannot work.

We were very gratified to find that the room of SEC staff was well-prepared and thoughtful. There were tough questions, and there are no guarantees where that conversation will lead, but we found that the conventional wisdom was very, very wrong. They wanted to learn about our business, and the industry, and like us, wanted to cut through the legalese to talk about it like real people.

If you’re a responsible blockchain project that hopes to sell a token in the United States at some point, you should go talk to the SEC. Go with your lawyers but go yourself.

Not just through intermediaries. Not just through a carefully controlled “no name” conversation with your attorneys.

Go directly and share what you’re building and why the world needs it.

Entrepreneurs and innovators should have that confidence. You might not get the answer you want, and you’ll certainly get tough questions, but you should still do it.

The prevailing tendency in the United States is to filter this entire industry through lawyers. We’ve put the intermediaries right back in the middle. We say we’re all about disintermediating huge sectors of the economy, but we don’t have the courage to talk to regulators without them speaking for us.

Now, don’t go fire your lawyers. They have an essential role to play in our industry. The good ones will help you prepare for this conversation, and help guide the conversation in the room with the SEC. Ours certainly did.

But CEOs, founders, when it comes to the moment of decision, ask yourself this: Is there anyone who can better describe your project, anyone more invested, anyone with more certainty as to why you need tokens and the blockchain than you?

Unless your lawyers know your project better than you do, you should take the lead.

Otherwise, we risk an entire industry being described to the regulators only in legalistic, risk-averse, loophole-seeking language that makes them think you’re trying to sneak something by them.

Why not instead tell them — without bravado, snake oil, or the used car sales pitch — why you started your business in the first place?

We don’t know where our dialogue with the SEC will eventually lead us. It’s just beginning. But we have a dialogue now.

Before we left the room, I asked the lead staffer in the meeting if she knew that projects in our industry were all being told not to talk to the SEC directly.

She said, “That’s terrible advice.”

If your business is real, and you want regulators in the United States to get the whole story, not just the horror stories, go to Washington, and talk to them yourselves. If we don’t, then we’ll be missing the most important part of the story, the part only the creators and visionaries can tell.