Crypto is one of the fastest growing areas of our economy: Chamber of Digital Commerce Founder

Bitcoin hovers near $40,000 after weekend rally. Chamber of Digital Commerce Founder and President Perianne Boring joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video transcript

- Welcome back to Yahoo! Finance Live as we've been discussing progress being made on that infrastructure bill, a plan between Democrats and Republicans to get it across the finish line. But it has caught a new sector, or a sector that we haven't talked about much in that infrastructure bill, certainly. In its crosshairs, that would be crypto, because we're talking about a $30 billion impact here for a wide swath of the sector.

And for more on the impacts from that, I want to bring on Perianne Boring, Chamber of Digital Commerce Founder and President joins us, once again. Perianne, good to see you again. I mean, this is something that has a lot of people talking about maybe mitigating the impacts here just because of how broad the language is in the updated text of the bill. But talk to me about what you're finding as you dig through it, and how big it could be here for crypto writ large.

PERIANNE BORING: Yeah. It's estimated that the crypto provision is paying for one-sixth of the entire infrastructure bill package. Kind of two things to clarify here. One, this is not a new tax on cryptocurrencies.

This is clarifying information reporting requirements on digital assets. Bringing clarity to these requirements is good for business. What is not good is to extend those requirements to people who have no way to comply with this.

That would be minors, validators, node operators, developers, or on the technology itself. So again, regulatory clarity is a positive thing in tax, in general. But this has to be done in a way that does not stifle the development and the innervation of this technology.

And as this bill is written today, it could be interpreted too broad to loop in companies, and people, and organizations that clearly are not brokers. And that could have a pretty devastating impact on the development of this technology in the United States.

- What do you mean specifically by that? I mean, is it that the provisions right now is way too broad, that it needs to be a little more specific, or that it needs to target the right part of-- if we're talking sort of the crypto ecosystem overall. When you talk about it stifling sort of the economic growth there in the space, what's your biggest concern?

PERIANNE BORING: Yeah. Our biggest concern is the definition of what a broker is. Brokers have information and reporting requirements. So again, it is appropriate for digital currency trading platforms, or traditional brokers who are dealing in digital assets, to have information reporting requirements.

It is not appropriate to extend those beyond those entities. We have been working on multiple iterations of the language of this bill. The earliest versions that we worked on were incredibly expansive.

Those have been narrowed down, but they're still not explicitly clear on node operators, miners, developers, validators, and other technical parts of the ecosystem that could not comply. So again, if you have reporting requirements on individuals, or on parts of the technology, if they can't comply, it's going to shove that-- that activity overseas. And that could have pretty huge impacts on our economy and even, potentially, international security.

- Not only that, but also it would kind of-- if you're kind of suggesting that this is going to be able to bring in close to $30 billion, and it's not possible, you're not going to see the pay for on the other end, too. So that's not going to be a win, either. So that's probably important to consider here.

But when you think about where this came from, I mean, there are some people in the crypto community-- I know you've been active in pushing for maybe tightening the language around brokers here-- but there are some that are just talking about where this came from, potentially, maybe out of nowhere, in getting included in the infrastructure bill this time around.

What would you say to maybe the push there over the last few years to help Congress understand crypto and what needs to happen when we're talking about regulations that would be a win-win?

PERIANNE BORING: Yeah. This did not come out of nowhere. The IRS Commissioner testified in front of the-- in front of the Senate Finance Committee back in April saying that IRS needs statutory authority to issue guidance on information reporting. Senator Portman also commented in that hearing saying that he is working on legislation on exactly that.

The process of including that as a pay for in the infrastructure process is not ideal, and I think it's somewhat inappropriate. I do believe the cryptocurrency space is one of the most promising and fastest growing areas in our economy, and it really deserves a sophisticated, and a dedicated, and a thoughtful public policy process.

Because it was tied into the infrastructure bill, it is being rushed through a very intense legislative process, and it has not given Congress the appropriate time that is needed to take into account all of the attributes of this technology, and how information reporting should and should not apply to the digital asset ecosystem.

So the process is certainly not ideal. There's a lot of people who have been working all throughout the weekend, including us at the Chamber, and late into the night just refining these definitions as much as we can. The process is not over. We have made significant amount of progress, but there is still more work to do.

- What's your estimation on how much this tax can generate in terms of revenue? If we're talking roughly what, $28 billion is what the Senate is looking at, is that a realistic number?

PERIANNE BORING: I really wish we-- we knew. We don't know. They have not released any information about where they came up with that in the scoring. That's an outstanding question everybody has.

And the Senate should share that information with everybody so we can analyze that and better understand if that's accurate or not. We just don't know. And there's a lot of other things about this bill we just don't know, because it is not clarified in the text.

- And lastly, Perianne, I mean, we've been talking a lot about centralized-- if you want to use the word broker since it's a catchall-- centralized entities here who are now working in the space trying to do everything they can to be up to board. And then you got people increasingly leaning in to DeFi and protocols that don't really have to deal with any of this because they aren't centrally run.

I wonder how-- the more we see regulations and taxes piled on and piled on here, what that does to maybe the push, eventually, into some of these decentralized ways of interacting with crypto now?

PERIANNE BORING: Yeah, again, I don't really think there's anybody pushing back on your traditional brokers having information and reporting requirements. I think everybody in the industry generally agrees that they apply to brokers. If there is not an intermediary who is effectuating transactions on behalf of a customer, that is going to be an incredibly difficult thing to enforce, and also for entities like decentralized exchanges, or peer-to-peer marketplaces to comply.

The one last point that I really want to make about this bill is that there is kind of this thought that the industry is just out of compliance, and that Americans who are using cryptocurrencies aren't paying their taxes. I just want to state for the record that that is a very disingenuous posture for anybody to take, because there has been multiple companies who have asked for clarification of reporting and recordkeeping requirements for taxes and digital assets for years.

Again, the problem is that this is being rushed through a legislative process, and there's many important things that really need to be thought out and much more carefully considered, and this process is really jeopardizing that.