Coinbase Believes United States Should Create a New Cryptocurrency Regulator

American cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase has laid out a proposal for the United States to regulate digital assets in a new policy.

It was on Thursday that the company warned that failure to appropriately regulate could leave the country even further “behind” other governments.

The U.S. should create a new regulator to oversee digital asset markets, Coinbase said in the proposal.

One of its investors, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, laid out a similar proposal for digital assets and other new technologies this week as well. The firm released its own vision of how next-generation internet services including blockchain and digital assets should be regulated.

Executives from a16z, as the firm is known, planned to meet with leaders across the government this week.

While a16z advocated for collaboration across regulatory agencies, Coinbase said in its policy report that there should be just one regulator for digital asset markets.

Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad told CNBC his team deliberately wanted to put out a bold plan to get a discussion started.

“We started where a lot of people start, which is taking the existing multiplicity of regulators and trying to figure out what minimal surgery you could do to make things work,” Shirzad said.

“And then there was a point at which, maybe three to four weeks ago, where we just kind of looked at each other [and] we said it takes more effort to try to adapt the current system which is predicated on an old market structure — more intellectual effort, I would say — than it does starting from scratch.”

He acknowledged that forming a new agency was certainly not the path of “least resistance.”

“I think at the end what we thought, because our proposal is just a beginning of a conversation, that it made sense for us not to compromise on the core points of principle that we think people, that policymakers, should think about,” he said to reporters.

Shirzad said Coinbase has already met with about three dozen lawmakers’ offices as well as several agencies to discuss aspects of the proposal. He said the feedback from Capitol Hill has so far been “welcoming.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.