During the DC Blockchain Summit, Chainlink Labs’ General Counsel Ben Sherwin sat down with U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty to discuss the GENIUS Act and American digital asset innovation.
“When I came into the United States Senate in 2021, there was a huge resistance to any digital assets,” Hagerty said. “Uncertainty was the name of the game.”
He attributed early industry failures like 2022’s FTX collapse to innovation moving offshore.
“If it had been regulated, it would have never happened,” he said.
“It was very clear we need to get this innovation back onshore. We need to support it in a way that allows that innovation to thrive here in America, because of the efficiencies that it can offer.”
Last July, the GENIUS Act, a landmark bill establishing the first federal guardrails for US dollar-pegged stablecoins, was signed into law. Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov called the legislation a definitive victory that accelerates the adoption of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, for which Chainlink provides the most comprehensive and widely used oracle infrastructure.
Hagerty, who introduced the GENIUS Act, described it as the “most bipartisan bill that has come out of the Senate Banking Committee in over a decade.”
“I was able to explain to my colleagues that in doing this, we’re taking a clunky process that was designed back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, one that takes 5 to 10 days to close, and we’re going to move that to something almost instantaneous as we go to the blockchain.”
In addition to reducing counterparty and currency risk, USD-backed stablecoins are designed to maximize security.
“What we’ve required is that a GENIUS-compliant stablecoin has to be backed dollar for dollar by short-term US Treasury securities or cash – that’s the safest instrument you could possibly have,” Hagerty explained.
Going forward, his priority is ensuring the digital asset economy thrives in the United States and sets the standard for a global method of tokenization.
“We need to create the most efficient clearing mechanism and the most efficient digital currency in the world so that the dollar remains the reserve currency of the world and that people all over the world want to use our digital dollars to transact.”
Watch the full interview.