Back in 2022, legislators in Olympia passed a bill creating a working group with a sole purpose to evaluate blockchain technology’s potential in Washington state. The legislation mandated a first meeting date by December 2022, a complete report a year later, and an expiration date of January 2024.
Those dates came and went, but the blockchain working group never met. Now, the legislation is expired.
According to multiple people close to the matter, the working group’s failure can be chalked up to government inefficiencies, lack of political will, and a quickly changing technological innovation landscape. The working group’s failure holds lessons for future working groups, such as the newly proposed AI task force and for a new iteration of the blockchain working group, which hopes to actually deliver on the report, despite not having a legislative mandate to do so.
“[The bill] was exciting because in Washington, for whatever reason, we’re just not very good at bringing the entire community together to work cohesively and holistically in general,” Arry Yu, chair of the Cascadia Blockchain Council and a member of the working group, said. “This bill was really important because the legislation mandated us to come together.”
But, the group never met. According to Yu, the main issue was that in 2022 the Department of Commerce didn’t have a replacement for its outgoing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Sector Lead, the person who would run the working group.
“I was completely full of angst because I didn’t know how to make [the meetings] happen,” she said. “The community was more than willing to do the work; it was frustrating we couldn’t do it without this key person in place.”
Joseph Williams took over as ICT lead last month. By then, the report from a group which had never met was due. According to Williams, another issue at play was the size of the group.
“The group was made up of a lot of very important people and trying to get them to show up to an important meeting— over 40 people — it’s tough,” he said.
Part of the problem was blockchain lost some of its luster in the face of newer technology, according to Williams.
“In November of 2022 ChatGPT came out,” Williams said. “Honestly, at that point, the oxygen got sucked out of the room. ChatGPT was immediately monetizable. It’s shiny, it’s exciting. Blockchain has always had a difficult path to monetization, so venture capitalist interest in blockchain stopped and interests started to morph.”
Now, Williams is working to produce the promised report on the blockchain landscape in Washington. Last week, a smaller working group — all volunteers, now that there is no legislative mandate — convened for the first time to work on a blockchain report which they estimate will be done by May.
“We had almost 100% attendance,” Yu said of the first meeting. Eleven of the 12 working group members consisting of academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. were there. The meeting was only planned two weeks ago. “The fact that everyone showed up means this is a high priority from a community standpoint,” she said.
The group includes Yu; Williams; John Bender (Corr Cronin); Sarah Frazar (PNNL), Jessical Greenwalt (Pixelkeet); Jeff Gaus (Provenance Chain Network); Keith Swensen (Commerce); Nick Ellingson (WTIA); Brittany Jarnot (WTIA); Mayor Lynne Robinson (Bellevue); Jonathan Blanco (Niftmint); and Amber Ore (IEEE).
Yu is optimistic a successful report could have “a real practical impact that helps state citizens take advantage of this technological space.” She speculated utilizing blockchain technology’s ledger capabilities to help preserve privacy or easing inefficient processes like updating records.
Whatever happens, the blockchain working group, both the one that failed and the current iteration, provide good lessons for future legislation.
“Avoiding what happened to the blockchain workgroup is exactly why I’m running a task force bill when I’m generally opposed to task forces,” Sen. Joe Nguyen said.
Nguyen is currently sponsoring a proposed bill to create an AI taskforce.
“Blockchain doesn’t have the same amount of energy,” Nguyen said. “It was one of those pet issues a member wanted to touch upon and to be seen as a leader on, but that wasn’t the perspective of everybody else.”
Meanwhile, with AI “everyone and their mother” wants to get in on AI legislation, he said.
At a hearing earlier this month, the proposed size of the AI group, 42 members, was perhaps the biggest conundrum to emerge.
But Nguyen said he’s aiming to make it smaller, with an executive committee of eight to 10 people, then dividing specific topic areas into subcommittees.
“The legislature and government in general are not great at legislating technology,” Nguyen said. “They’re fundamentally set up to solve yesterday’s problems tomorrow. The point of this is being thoughtful to make sure we do it and from there, timing policies that could mitigate negative impacts, but not stifle innovation.”
