Law Decoded: Looking ahead to 2022, Jan. 3–10

cointelegraph.com:

As Alex Tapscott put it, 2021 was the year when many governments and lawmakers began to finally wake up to the transformational potential of blockchain technology. Indeed, crypto’s global mainstreaming and growing market capitalization have made it difficult for the agents of power to ignore it and have rendered it a salient economic, social and political issue across many key jurisdictions. By all appearances, we are in for a busy year in crypto regulation and policymaking.

Stablecoins, an asset class that attracted a fair amount of regulatory attention in 2021, will surely remain in the hot seat this year. For most nations, stable-value crypto assets will represent competition to their sovereign digital currencies. For the United States, a key question is whether Congress will come forward with the legislation around stablecoins that the President's Working Group on Financial Markets is calling for.

It will also be exciting to watch how far the crypto industry’s political mobilization and lobbying efforts — something that became a prominent feature of the crypto policy landscape in 2021 — will be able to reach this year. A major test of the sector’s newfound political clout will be the struggle to amend the crypto-related provisions of the recently passed infrastructure bill.

Many industry experts surveyed by Cointelegraph expect major policy advancements to come from the European Union in 2022. The European Commission is currently reviewing the proposed Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, a wide-reaching framework that is mainly focused on mitigating consumer and financial stability risks associated with the adoption of digital assets. Combined with digital euro trials being well underway, this suggests that the EU