Dear Friend, 

As your representative, I have the pleasure of serving as the lead Republican on the Subcommittee for Oversight and Investigations within the House Financial Services Committee. I also have a keen interest in advancing policy that will welcome digital asset innovation and opportunity onshore.

When I came to Congress in 2015, a staffer of mine gave me a book called The Age of Cryptocurrency, which discusses the potential for blockchain and crypto to restore financial control to the individual. This is the promise of decentralization. In November, FTX, a global centralized cryptocurrency exchange – a business that connects people to trade digital assets – collapsed, defrauding and harming an estimated one million crypto investors across the world.

Last month, John Ray, FTX’s new CEO, testified before our committee on the facts and findings of his investigation into FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. He mentioned his concerns about the concentration of power in a small group of individuals with no oversight. That is the exact problem that open and permissionless technology like crypto and blockchain solve: the problem of centralization.

FTX had disastrous or even nonexistent systems for accounting, audit, cash management, cybersecurity, human resources, risk management and other unacceptable management practices. These failures are currently making Mr. Ray’s efforts to uncover the facts and mitigate harm to FTX customers very difficult. By contrast, the immutable characteristic of public blockchains fortunately allowed the crypto community to reveal Mr. Bankman-Fried’s fraud, and the on-chain public record will assist law enforcement moving forward.

We must understand Mr. Bankman-Fried’s con for what it is: a failure of centralization, a failure of business ethics, and a crime. It is not a failure of technology.

Sincerely,