Coming up with a list of the 100 most influential people in crypto and blockchain is hard in any year. But doing it in 2021 is particularly difficult as the industry advanced from moving into the mainstream to actually being in it. And that makes “influence” a moving target.
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Fed’s Powell: 2021 ‘an important year’ for digital dollar
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said 2021 will be a key year for the U.S. as it decides whether to create a digital currency, and what it would look like
Speaking before the House Financial Services Committee on Feb. 24, Powell said 2021 “is going to be the year that we engage with the public pretty actively” on the digital dollar project. He added that there are still significant technical challenges to be met, as well as major policy decisions to be made, before the U.S. decides to create a digital dollar.
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The Human Rights Foundation's Alex Gladstein says bitcoin is vital to privacy (Photo: Human Rights Foundation)Human Rights Foundation: ‘Don’t demonize’ bitcoin
Cracking down on privacy tools like encrypted messaging and bitcoin does more to help the police state than to hurt criminals and terrorists said its chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein
Arguing that “Bitcoin is neutral like cash,” Gladstein said “Most Americans may not yet grasp that financial privacy is just as important as communications privacy for our democracy—that your spending habits say more about you than your words.”
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Crypto vet Kelly Loeffler loses Senate seat
Sen. Loeffler, who stepped down as CEO of crypto derivatives platform Bakkt in December 2019 to take up a Georgia Senate seat, appears to have lost her re-election campaign
Loeffler resigned as CEO of Bakkt, a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and custody firm owned by NYSE-parent company Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, shortly ahead of her appointment to Georgia’s empty U.S. Senate seat on Dec. 4, 2019.
