



If Wyoming is the most crypto-friendly state in America, it’s largely thanks to one woman. Caitlin Long is a volunteer for the Wyoming Blockchain Coalition and an appointee by the government of Wyoming to the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force.





It all started when Long tried to donate Bitcoin to her undergraduate university, the University of Wyoming.





“Because Wyoming had a bad law pertaining to the transmission of money, the university was not able to accept my donation,” Long told LongHash. “So, I set about to fix that law and thought it would just be a simple thing, just an effort to do one thing, and it ballooned and now we’ve gotten 13 different laws enacted.”





“We took all taxes off crypto assets at the state level,” Long explained. “No state tax, no property tax, no income tax at the state level. We also clarified — this is actually going to sound really boring but it’s very important — we clarified the legal status of digital assets under the law. So that if there’s ever a bankruptcy, or there’s ever a divorce where people are fighting over the assets, the judges know exactly what they are and how they should treat them.”

“I’m most proud of the fact that we have so many other states copying us now,” she says. “There are, I think, eight states that enacted the same law that Wyoming did for utility tokens, that say utility tokens are not securities.” Long says the states that are in some way following in Wyoming’s footsteps include Colorado, Missouri, Rhode Island, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Montana and Ohio.





Long’s interest in Bitcoin stems from her 22-years of experience on Wall Street, including running Morgan Stanley’s pension solutions business. She says she was “really horrified” at some of the things that she saw on Wall Street, namely that “we don’t have clear property rights in our assets.”





“You’re in a debtor-creditor relationship with your securities firm. You don’t own your securities outright. So if your securities firm goes down, like Lehman Brothers did for example, you’re caught up in the bankruptcy of the firm, you can’t take your asset back.”





Bitcoin, on the other hand, gives you very clear property rights. You either own it or you don’t. “If you possess the private key, then you own it outright,” Long says. “You can enter in contractual arrangements, where you can lend it, for sure, but you have the direct property right, you have absolute control over your asset.”





At the practical level, Wyoming’s embrace of crypto could bring jobs, companies and revenue to the state. This is already happening, Long says. She points to IOHK, which relocated to Wyoming from Hong Kong.





“This is the Cardano blockchain company, and they’re probably the most prominent. They’ve put a couple of developers on the ground in Cheyenne. Wyoming is a small state, so a couple of jobs is pretty meaningful. In fact I know there are 40 in the pipeline, just in the town of Cheyenne alone.”





Wyoming’s crypto friendliness, however, does not reflect the attitude of the U.S. government. Some in the crypto community are concerned that overly strict U.S. regulations will push crypto activity to other countries, particularly in Asia. Long echoes this sentiment. “We already are behind,” she says.





“I think it’s because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and the U.S. really tightly regulates the financial system for that reason,” Long says.





She says U.S. crypto development poses a direct contrast to that of the Internet, “where President Clinton in the 1990s stepped back and said I’m going to take a light touch approach to this, when fraud occurs I’ll prosecute fraud, but I’m not going to regulate this. And look what happened, the US became clearly the center of innovation in the Internet in the 1990s. That is not true with crypto today. Even though a lot of crypto companies started in the United States, most of them ended up in other countries.”





The biggest issue, she says, is not the Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s the attitude of the bank regulators toward the crypto industry, and the fact that “very few startups, legitimate startups, can keep bank accounts.”





The other problem are laws that are not “future proof.” “I think a lot of the securities laws and financial laws in the United States absolutely did not foresee that the technology was going to change.” These laws are not easy to change, and a divided Congress is certainly not helping matters.





If crypto really is the future, what can Americans do to make sure their country doesn’t fall behind? “Everyone needs to get involved,” Long says. “What we did in Wyoming shows that if you sit on the sidelines, you get nothing done.”



