Coin Center gets $1M donation from Grayscale with promise of more

Grayscale aims to expand on the popularity of Kraken’s donation-and-match scheme in 2018.

Grayscale Investments, the world’s biggest digital asset manager, has committed $1 million to Coin Center, Washington, D.C.’s most prominent cryptocurrency lobbying group—a development that it hopes would further expand the industry’s “foundational knowledge.”

The million-dollar donation was confirmed in a press release on Monday, which also disclosed Grayscale’s intention to match donations to the Coin Center by the end of February. Over time, Grayscale plans to match dollar-for-dollar contributions to an extra $1 million.

Grayscale got the inspiration for the donate-and-match program from Kraken, the San Francisco-based exchange that managed to raise over $3 million for Coin Center in 2018. That included $2 million in direct support from Kraken.

“Coin Center has played a key role in advocating for issues that affect our ecosystem,” Grayscale told Cointelegraph.

The asset manager added that in the past two months, “Coin Center filed two strong comment letters that played a key part in correcting issues in proposed rulemaking by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, that would have had serious negative consequences for self-hosted wallet users and the overall digital currency industry.”

Coin Center is a leading think tank focused on advancing public policy issues in the area of digital assets and blockchain. In 2017, the lobbying organization went to Congress to teach the lawmakers how Bitcoin works. Last year, the group reached out to the blockchain world to help ensure the COVID-19-era lock-down policies should not conflict with civil rights and privacy.

When asked about the most urgent lobbying work expected for the crypto industry today, Grayscale said:

“It all comes down to education. Regulators need to have foundational knowledge of a topic to be able to make informed decisions about the bills that cross their desk. Education is both the biggest challenge and opportunity for our industry when it comes to policymakers.”

Neeraj Agrawal, Coin Center Director of Communications, told Cointelegraph that the community and industry’s continued funding of the advocacy organization had been “blown away by the community and industry’s continued support” “We are going to use these funds to continue representing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency in general in D.C.,” he stated.

In the coming year, Coin Center plans to stay focused on strengthening financial privacy and “more sensible tax policy,” Agrawal said.

 

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