Crypto notches a win among professional accountants
In his regular column, J.W. Verret, a law professor, attorney, CPA, and head of the Crypto Freedom Lab covers law and regulation of cryptocurrency with a focus on decentralized finance (DeFi) and financial privacy.
Institutional adoption is an exciting yet frustrating topic in crypto. The true modern-day crypto inheritors of the 90s cypherpunk legacy have a vision for crypto as human empowerment through decentralization. That vision includes breaking down the intermediaries that charge rents and threaten human freedom and privacy. On the other hand, Crypto Twitter becomes abuzz when a large financial institution makes new moves into crypto.
Dogecoin (DOGE) mooned on the hopes that Elon Musk would use Twitter to help the cryptocurrency’s adoption. The cognitive dissonance extends to the institutions themselves, as banks start crypto projects without considering how a crypto payment system built on the Bitcoin Lightning Network or an Ethereum layer 2 is intended to make that very bank obsolete.
Those broader philosophical questions aside, the United States-based Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, instituted a change to accounting standards in October that will help public companies hold digital assets on their balance sheet. For now, that’s good for both institutions and crypto.
The old method of accounting for crypto on company books was to account for it as software. It went on the balance sheet at its historical cost and then was written down as a value impairment on every price drop (but not written up again when prices went up). This was a deterrent to public company holdings for anyone but the die-hard Michael Saylors of the world. It’s hard to hold an asset that might remain recorded on your books at the
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