Two subcommittees of the United States Congress will hold a meeting next week to discuss the applications of the blockchain technology.
The meeting is called “Beyond Bitcoin: emerging applications of the blockchain technology” and will be held on February 14th. The participants will be from the Subcommittee on Research and Technology and the Subcommittee on Oversight. Both of the subcommittees belong to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the United States House of Representatives.
At the moment, no further details and goals of the meeting have been published. It is important to say that the Subcommittee on Oversight has the power to assign resources to projects in development, which allows the possibility for the Congress to launch a project that would bring it closer to the blockchain technology behind the cryptocurrencies and other projects.
Likewise, according to the invitation from the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, members of the economic sector whose companies have already adopted the blockchain technology will also participate in the meeting. One of them is Frank Yiannas, the vice president for food safety in Walmart. Walmart adopted the blockchain technology last year in order to avoid the food fraud.
Some of the other participants in the meeting will be Charles Romine, the Director of the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); Chris Jaikaran, an analyst for the Cybersecurity Policy of the Congressional Research Service, Aaron Wright, Associate Clinical Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Jerry Cuomo, the Vice President for the Blockchain Technologies at IBM.
This will be the second meeting organized by a government institution of the United States this month and related to the cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology. Almost a week ago, on February 5th, the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs welcomed the presidents of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in order to discuss their opinion on the cryptocurrencies.
During that meeting, Christopher Giancarlo, the President of the CFTC, explained that since 2015 the cryptocurrencies are a product or commodity for the institution behind them and that is why there is no regulatory jurisdiction over the platforms that execute transactions with virtual currencies.
The meeting held by the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs showed there was still certain mistrust of the US authorities towards the cryptocurrencies. Nevertheless, the stance towards the blockchain technology seems to be getting more and more positive as the time passes, despite the fact this technology is closely related to the cryptocurrencies.
