Blockchain Association: Washington's Most Aggressive Crypto Industry Lobby

The Blockchain Association describes itself as a trade association for the crypto industry. It is more usefully understood as the crypto industry’s Washington enforcement mechanism — the organisation that fights regulatory overreach through litigation when lobbying fails, deploys professional policy analysis in support of legislative outcomes its members want, and builds the congressional relationships that keep crypto regulation on a favourable trajectory.

It is not a disinterested research institution. Its member roster — Coinbase, Kraken, Protocol Labs, Uniswap, and scores of other crypto-native firms — has specific interests in specific regulatory outcomes, and the Blockchain Association exists to advance those interests through every available mechanism. Understanding this clearly is the starting point for understanding why the Association’s research and advocacy outputs, while often technically sophisticated and substantively accurate, should be read as advocacy rather than analysis.

Founding and Membership

The Blockchain Association was founded in 2018, as the first wave of SEC enforcement actions against initial coin offerings (ICOs) began to make clear that the crypto industry needed professional representation in Washington. Before 2018, the crypto industry’s DC presence was thin to non-existent for most firms; the Association provided a collective vehicle for an industry that had been politically inert.

The membership evolved significantly between 2018 and 2025. The founding membership was dominated by exchanges and token issuers — the firms most immediately threatened by SEC enforcement. As the policy agenda broadened to include DeFi regulation, stablecoin legislation, and Bitcoin ETF approval, the Association’s membership expanded to include protocol developers (Protocol Labs, the organisation behind Filecoin and IPFS), DeFi protocols (Uniswap Foundation), and infrastructure providers.

This membership breadth creates internal tensions that the Association manages through its priority-setting process. Centralised exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken have different regulatory interests than DeFi protocols — exchanges want regulatory clarity that legitimises their operations, while DeFi protocols often prefer regulatory ambiguity that leaves them free to operate without broker-dealer registration. The Association’s policy positions necessarily navigate these internal tensions, which sometimes produces deliberately vague positions on contested questions.

Kristin Smith’s Leadership and DC Relationships

Kristin Smith joined the Blockchain Association as Executive Director in 2018 and has built it into the most professionally capable crypto lobbying organisation in Washington. Her background — working in the office of Senator Mike Lee and as a lobbyist on technology issues before joining the Association — gave her both the Hill relationships and the legislative process knowledge that the organisation needed.

Smith’s strategic insight was that the crypto industry needed to be present in Washington not just when regulatory threats emerged, but continuously — building relationships, educating staff, and establishing the Association as a reliable source of accurate technical information about how crypto systems work. This continuous engagement model, rather than the episodic fire-fighting that characterised earlier crypto industry attempts at DC engagement, is what made the Association effective.

Under Smith’s leadership, the Association expanded its staff with former congressional staffers, SEC and CFTC alumni, and policy researchers with relevant expertise. This personnel strategy — hiring people who understand the regulatory institutions and have personal relationships within them — is standard practice for effective Washington lobbying organisations, and the Association executes it as well as any comparable body in the financial services sector.

The Litigation Strategy

The most distinctive aspect of the Blockchain Association’s strategy is its systematic use of litigation as a policy tool. The Association files amicus briefs in major crypto cases — SEC v Coinbase, SEC v Ripple, and others — providing courts with industry-perspective legal analysis designed to shape how courts understand the legal questions at stake.

Amicus briefs in major regulatory litigation are one of the most effective tools available to industry groups seeking to influence law through the courts rather than through legislation. A well-crafted amicus brief provides the court with arguments and information that the parties may not have raised, and signals to the court that a decision has broader legal implications beyond the specific case. The Blockchain Association’s briefs have consistently argued that the SEC has overstepped its statutory authority in applying existing securities law to crypto assets without congressional authorisation — the “major questions doctrine” argument that has been increasingly influential in the post-Chevron regulatory environment.

The Association also supports and coordinates member litigation. When Coinbase filed its petition seeking a federal court order requiring the SEC to respond to Coinbase’s rulemaking petition, the Association’s network of legal expertise and DC relationships supported the strategic decision. The threat of coordinated litigation from multiple members simultaneously has value as a deterrent against regulatory overreach, even when individual cases are never filed.

Legislative Engagement

On the legislative side, the Blockchain Association has been a central participant in drafting and advancing the major crypto legislation of 2024-2026. The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) — which passed the House in 2024 with bipartisan support before stalling in the Senate — reflected Association lobbying priorities: a framework that moved crypto assets toward CFTC jurisdiction (generally more favourable than SEC jurisdiction for crypto-native products) and provided regulatory clarity for digital asset exchanges.

The GENIUS Act on stablecoins similarly reflects priorities that the Association and its members had been advancing in various forms since 2022. Association staff participated directly in drafting discussions, providing technical input on how stablecoin reserve requirements should be structured, what disclosure obligations were appropriate, and how the legislation should define the line between payment stablecoins and investment products.

This legislative engagement is not publicised in detail by the Association — the specific contributions of trade association staff to legislative text are rarely acknowledged publicly. But the fingerprints of professional crypto lobbying are visible in the technical precision of provisions that reflect deep familiarity with how crypto systems actually work.

Comparison with the Chamber of Digital Commerce

The Blockchain Association’s chief rival for the identity of “primary crypto voice in Washington” is the Chamber of Digital Commerce, founded by Perianne Boring in 2014. The two organisations serve different but overlapping constituencies and employ meaningfully different strategies.

The Chamber is more institutionally oriented, explicitly courting traditional financial institutions and positioning itself as the more bank-friendly crypto industry voice. Its membership includes both crypto-native firms and TradFi institutions building digital asset capabilities, and its policy positions tend to be more accommodating of the kind of regulatory structure that banks find comfortable.

The Blockchain Association is more crypto-native in its orientation and more aggressive in its tactics. It is more willing to litigate, more willing to publicly criticise regulators by name, and more aligned with the interests of crypto-native firms that see bank-like regulation as existential. The contrast reflects genuine differences in member interests: a Chamber member building a bank-issued stablecoin has different regulatory preferences than a Blockchain Association member running a DeFi protocol.

The Advocacy-Research Distinction

The Blockchain Association publishes policy papers, legal analyses, and research reports that are substantively serious and often technically accurate. Its work on the legal status of digital assets, the constitutional limits of SEC jurisdiction, and the practical implications of proposed regulatory rules is produced by skilled policy professionals who understand the subject matter.

But the research serves the advocacy. When the Association publishes analysis arguing that a proposed SEC rule would harm innovation, the analysis is crafted to make that argument as effectively as possible — not to explore the question of whether the rule’s innovation costs outweigh its investor protection benefits in a genuinely balanced way. This is not a criticism specific to the Association; it is how trade association policy research works, in crypto and in every other industry. The important thing is to read it as advocacy — accurate, sophisticated advocacy, but advocacy nonetheless.