Hsu discusses stablecoin standards

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On April 27, acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael J. Hsu issued a statement regarding stablecoin standards after appearing before the Artificial Intelligence and the Economy: Charting a Path for Responsible and Inclusive AI symposium hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, FinRegLab, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. According to Hsu, the internet has “technical foundations” that “provide for an open, royalty-free network.” He further noted that “[t]hose foundations did not emerge on their own. They were developed by standard setting bodies like IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which had representatives with differing perspectives, a shared public interest ethos, and a strong leader committed to the vision of an open and inclusive internet.” Hsu further stated that stablecoins do not have “shared standards and are not interoperable.” However, to make stablecoins “open and inclusive,” Hsu said that he believed that “a standard setting initiative similar to that undertaken by IETF and W3C needs to be established, with representatives not just from crypto/Web3 firms, but also from academia and government.” As previously covered by InfoBytes, Hsu discussed stablecoin policy considerations earlier this month in remarks before the Institute of International Economic Law at Georgetown University Law Center, calling for the establishment of an “intentional architecture” for stablecoins developed through principles of “[s]tability, interoperability and separability,” as well as “core values” of “privacy, security, and preventing illicit finance.”