J.W. Verret is a Harvard-educated attorney who teaches corporate finance and accounting at George Mason University. His work has increasingly intersected with the cryptocurrency sector in recent years, as his legion of Twitter followers — who know him as “BlockProf,” or the Blockchain Professor — are poignantly aware.
Aside from his work at GMU, Verret has become known as a vocal advocate for crypto as the top honcho at Crypto Freedom Lab, a think tank fighting devoted to preserving “freedom and privacy for crypto developers and users.” He also serves as a professional legal witness for defendants accused — wrongfully, Verret would argue — of evading financial-tracking laws, and is authoring a book, tentatively titled “Blockchain Privacy and Forensics.” In between, he finds time to serve as a regular columnist for Cointelegraph.
1) You’re very busy professionally — teaching at George Mason University, serving on committees with the Securities and Exchange Commission, going to trials as expert witness. How did life lead you to cryptocurrency?
I spent 15 years as a libertarian regulation/financial person, writing it, think-tanking it in Washington, D.C. For the first 10 years, I lost everything I fought for in the Dodd-Frank era.
The thing with crypto is that it’s been a freedom revolution in finance. It fixes, or aims to fix, problems in finance that government regulation only aims to fix. Regulation entrenches intermediaries where crypto fixes problems by eliminating the need for those intermediaries. And that was very interesting to me.
2) You served on the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, but you’ve also been very vocal in criticizing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. How was that experience?
It was good. I replaced Hester Peirce when she became an SEC commissioner. I wrote a lot of dissents as a committee member, so I hope I did Hester proud, but I do not think they’ll invite me back in the future under the current chairman. It seems like he’s been trying to just destroy this industry.
He could’ve reached out to the industry to try…
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