THE GARY GENSLER TRAP! All of crypto is waiting, hoping, praying for CLARITY to advance this week — but can we just quickly consider the path if that doesn't happen? 1) The SEC likely deploys their Project Crypto stop-gap band-aid 2) Then there's a 80/20 shot Dems undo it all in the next admin Nobody really believes anything meaningful is coming onchain if builders need to worry about a Gary Gensler 2.0 (this, of course, is the whole reason the crypto industry is pushing for the rules proposed in CLARITY.) But I think there is a silver lining worth exploring here — and maybe it's what Gensler feared all along. (For anyone who was in crypto before the great purge of 2022, this should be fairly obvious.) Back then, the Gensler playbook was pretty clear: Go after anyone offering anything of value in crypto for unregistered security offerings. NFTs? Securities. ETH? Potentially a security. Memecoins? Basically the only thing that was allowed. lol Considering that, it's a pretty obvious reaction to see the crypto industry giants (like Coinbase, etc.) pursue a bill that will codify how this process can legally work, and finally lay out rules for when *exactly* an asset becomes a security vs. a commodity. But is that the best outcome for everything in crypto? Particularly for an industry that once prided itself on decentralization, dis-intermediation, and root ownership, it is OK to say no! After all, it was Bitcoin's original model that pioneered value accrual to a community that used a network. This value did not accrue to a VC. This value did not accrue to insiders. But to anyone who cared enough to be early and participate permissionlessly. It's been 2 years since the industry had Gensler hanging over it. In those two years, the major industry players have seemingly bent the knee to the same thinking — that anything of value in crypto must follow the security framework onchain. Does that give you something closer to the old system Bitcoin sought to destroy? Or something closer to Bitcoin? Whether CLARITY passes or not, the industry still needs to reckon with that question.