Wyoming remains bullish on crypto despite FTX’s collapse
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Software engineer Jae Yang got a lot of questions from friends when he moved from Silicon Valley with plans to launch his cryptocurrency exchange not in the up-and-coming urban crypto hubs of Miami or Austin, Texas, but the windswept plains of southeastern Wyoming.
While the collapse of the massive FTX exchange and recent arrest of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, have compounded concerns about crypto, Wyoming remains at full steam ahead in wooing the industry. It has enacted a suite of new laws — with possibly more to come — seeking to make the industry more regulated and reputable to attract businesses like Yang’s.
“FTX would not have happened if it was a Wyoming company,” said Steven Lupien, director of the Center for Blockchain and Digital Innovation at the University of Wyoming. “Wyoming got it right. We knew five years ago when we started down this path that appropriate regulation was the way to go.”
While Lupien contends the state’s agencies would have picked up on the “shenanigans” going on with the exchange, others aren’t so sure.
“There wouldn’t be anybody in Wyoming who’s sophisticated enough to audit something on the scale of FTX,” said Cheyenne attorney Larry Wolfe. “If you’re a true believer, of course you’ll say it could never happen here. But of course it could happen here.”
So far, there’s little sign of the crypto industry that Wyoming has courted for the past five years. But Yang says fledgling exchanges like the one he’s hoping will open for business in 2023 could be the start of an influx in the state.
His Tacen Inc. business already has about a dozen employees, roughly one-third of the company’s global workforce, working in a downtown office building in Cheyenne, Wyoming’s capital city of 65,000 people.
“We said, OK, what is the right place to locate out of? And Wyoming is the right place,” Yang said. “Basically they’ve passed a whole set of laws that makes it easier for me to do business.”
Some of those new laws seek to discourage speculating with crypto bank customers’ digital assets, a suspected cause of FTX’s fall.
Wyoming officials remain bullish on crypto, the digital currencies such as bitcoin and etherium based on decentralized, encrypted ledgers called blockchain.
Much of crypto’s appeal is there’s no middleman: Money can move freely between people without the involvement of government or traditional banks. Transactions are instantaneous, although the scant legal and regulatory oversight appeals to drug dealers and other criminals who need to move money discreetly.
All the while, the value of crypto — which skeptics say is rooted in nothing
more than the say-so of its users — is by now famously unstable, with bitcoin alone down in value by almost two-thirds in the past year.
Wyoming’s strategy amid all of this is to attract the crypto industry with the respectability of regulation. Though many traditional banks help customers invest in crypto, Wyoming is among very few states, including Nebraska, allowing crypto banks called specific purpose depository institutions (SPDIs or “speedies”).
Wyoming’s “speedies” can’t issue loans, can’t reuse customers’ funds without their approval and must back up 100% of customer deposits with liquid funds.
But while Wyoming has issued four state licenses for crypto banks since 2020, none has fully opened for business, if at all. That’s largely contingent on a federal lawsuit filed by one of the banks, Custodia, seeking access to Federal Reserve services, including its electronic payments system. Should it win authorization, Custodia and other banks would provide a massive financial boost to Wyoming because they would be required to pay the state 0.02% of their assets each year, CEO Caitlin Long said.