The digital assets industry needs more positive, publicly known use cases, or it risks getting politicized in a way that leads to bad policy, according to Andrew Yang, the Democratic Party presidential candidate turned independent. 

“The best way to avoid regulatory overreach is to have positive use cases for blockchain in solving real problems for American people,” Yang said today at the North American Blockchain Summit in Fort Worth, Texas. “Unfortunately, the main use case people think of is what they see in the news – Sam Bankman Fried and FTX.” 

Yang believes overcoming the sting and speculation requires implementing blockchain technology in ways that matter to more Americans. For example, how we vote. 

Decentralizing the political process 

“Why is it that we can’t vote on our mobile phones, for example. We run our lives on our phones, and you can do that on the blockchain in a way that’s secure, tamper-proof, and verifiable. That should be a vision that Americans can get behind. If we say, look this isn’t just a financial speculation vehicle or a storehouse of value – this can actually solve problems that you care about. That’s the way to translate it to a broader group of Americans,” he said. 

Yang was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Yang said his Forward Party is now the third biggest political party in the country by resources without citing a source. “There’s a steep drop between number two and three, but we’re number three and growing,” he said. 

Nearly 50 percent of Americans self-classify as independents, yet independents can’t vote in primaries in many states, Yang said. He’d like to eradicate primaries altogether, which two states have already done – Maine and Nevada. 

The technology to reform the voting process is already mature, and the real challenge is the stronghold the legacy parties have on the system, Yang said. "It’s not about the security,” he said. “What they want to do is limit the number of people who vote, so they can predict and game the outcome. They don’t want the American people to have control of their own futures.” 

Yang’s keynote followed Vivek Ramaswamy’s announcement of his party’s crypto framework, highlighting a similar resistance. The 2024 Republican presidential candidate said the problem in DC isn’t a lack of knowledge, but a threat to the status quo. 

Yang, a long-time universal basic income proponent, spoke with a sense of urgency, highlighting AI’s corrosive effect on the political environment, which will come to a head in the 2024 election cycle. He believes we still haven’t scratched the surface of what blockchain tools can do to help combat these problems.