Capitol Hill War Stories from a DC Lobbyist Who’s Seen It All (SBF, Gensler, Elizabeth Warren)

**David** (0:02)
I'm here with Ron Hammond. He is the head of policy and advocacy over at Wintermute. Ron, welcome to the show.

**Ron Hammond** (0:08)
David, it's been a while. I hope everything's going well, and looking forward to getting to all of it, man. There's a lot to talk, cover right now, so.

**David** (0:14)
Yeah, there has been a growing history of crypto in DC.
Maybe just for back context, 95% of our time together has been in just signal chat, asking you about like, what does this mean? What's going on? What's the truth here when it comes to like me and Ryan trying to figure out what the hell is going on in Capitol Hill? Because there's the version of Capitol Hill, crypto in Capitol Hill that they want you to see. And then there's the version that's like kind of going on under the hood. And those two things don't really line up. Maybe to set the table, just how long have you been in DC?

**Ron Hammond** (0:54)
So it's been 10 years.

**David** (0:56)
It feels like all of them.

**Ron Hammond** (0:57)
Yeah, pretty much. Since crypto policy was a thing, it's been me and three other people who have been on the staff side involved in this stuff.
For example, he's on Capitol Hill when I worked there. So I started working there in 2015, left in 2019 to go work at Ripple and cover that later on. But I worked for Warren Davidson from Ohio. And he was a freshman member. And everyone's, it's kind of like high school. Everyone's trying to find their own certain lane in policy. And he was trying to do more venture capital issues. But then he had a whole conversation with the leadership a couple hours, and I'm like 24 at the time. But apparently, it's like, hey, you're a freshman, you're kind of getting the bomb rung in the issues, just do crypto or something. And he really took that to heart. He went over to me and said, hey Ron, do you know anything about crypto?
I'm like, well, I may have not bought an I think ID on the Silk Road in college, but that's pretty much all I know about crypto. And he goes, congratulations, you're the guy that is now in charge of crypto policy. So that's how it happened. I was like, you're gonna make me at 24 and dump that on my desk. But at the same time, it's kind of cool because it's the most brand new territory. There's no left versus right. There's no policy line. There's no policy in general.
So that's kind of how I got into this space. I worked with a couple of Democrats and Republicans on the Token Taxonomy Act, which is the first crypto regulatory market structure bill. Back then, it was about 20 pages or so. And the Clarity Act is 309 pages or whatever. But the early stages of Clarity Act that we're going to talk about probably pretty soon, that was the Token Taxonomy Act and several other bills down the road. But that's what I worked on. It was the first bipartisan bill on market structure, which I was really adamant about, making sure we had KETAs bipartisan because of the first of its kind. And then after that, I decided to go over to Inhouse. So I can give it more in-depth kind of everything where I've ended up at, including the Blockchain Association, now Wintermute. But it's been a fun ride, man. I've been kind of seeing it from all angles here. It's been exciting.

**David** (2:42)
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