Eng lead @coinbase for political advocacy and Coinbase Advisor. Doing my part to help create more economic freedom.
New York, NY
Joined February 2009
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Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
NY Mag's long @SenGillibrand piece ends with Maple the Labradoodle barking at the reporter, which seems about right. The case against the senator: she wants rules for crypto, while the experts quoted would rather hope "no one uses these things," in a market already measured in trillions. That's not a regulatory philosophy, and it doesn't protect a single consumer. It's wishcasting.
Crypto appeared on Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s radar not long after her presidential campaign fizzled out in 2019. The more she learned, she said, the more frustrated she became that lawmakers seemed content to leave it alone.
In 2025, Gillibrand was the lead Democratic sponsor of the GENIUS Act, which laid down federal rules for stablecoins. This year, she played much the same role for the CLARITY Act, the crypto industry’s great unfinished legislative project, pressing fellow Democrats for their votes. The sweeping bill would have moved much of digital-asset trading out of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s securities-law regime and into a new framework overseen by the chronically underfunded and much weaker Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
“In my opinion, the CLARITY Act was a financial crisis waiting to happen,” says Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank of New York official. When FTX collapsed in 2022, the damage remained largely contained within crypto because digital assets still had relatively few connections to banks and traditional markets. CLARITY, Reiners argued, would have helped erase that separation: “Certainly, if CLARITY had passed, it would have supercharged the integration of crypto into the financial system.”
Gillibrand now finds herself in a crypto-related ethical morass. Her 22-year-old son, Theo, is the head of a start-up backed in part by crypto investors — including one who donates to his mother — that is seeking regulatory approval to bring a crypto-native trading product into conventional financial markets. Her campaign coffers are stuffed with crypto money, while former aides have rotated between her office and the industry.
Nate Weisberg reports on one of crypto’s most important Democratic allies and what happens if Gillibrand succeeds in making crypto easier to use and more deeply embedded in ordinary finance: nymag.visitlink.me/_kvMeE
There’s nothing more damaging to society than a politician trying to regulate something they don’t understand.
So, for those of you who missed it, Illinois just dropped its draft rules for their no good, very bad Digital Asset Tax and, y’all, it’s a mess, especially for DeFi.
The proposed rules would treat a DEX (not an interface, the protocol itself) that charges a “protocol fee” as a “broker” that must register with the state, collect a 0.2% tax on the full value of every swap by an Illinois user, and keep each user’s address, IP, and W-9. Effectively mandated KYC.
It also requires brokers to keep customers’ private keys… I don’t even know where to begin on that one.
Essentially a worse version of the repealed IRS broker rule.
Thankfully @BlockchainAssn, @crypto_council, and the @DigitalChamber have sued the state, but we need a full court press on this from a political and policy perspective.
It’s my personal #1 priority, because I doubt Illinois will be the last to try this.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case).
I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves.
We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them:
"/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started"
I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.
One of the biggest productivity unlocks
I’ve had with my AI tooling: I stopped “exporting” to other tools for additional analysis/work.
No google docs, no excel. Everything stays in the harness. Only export for reporting.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
The midterms are about 5 weeks away.
Crypto isn't a partisan issue. It's about whether the next generation of financial technology gets built in America.
Before you vote, check where your candidates stand: standwithcrypto.org
See you at the ballot box in November.
The 2024 election proved the importance of the crypto voter.
@standwithcrypto is now much bigger, with over 4M members.
Crypto voters will remember who stepped up and who didn't.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
Here we go again! The WSJ is working on a story blaming Coinbase and me personally for the CLARITY Act not passing.
The Journal has repeatedly been hostile to CLARITY in its reporting, regurgitating bank lobby talking points, while I’ve spent years pushing for crypto legislation, but that’s not stopping them from trying to reverse the blame.
The boring TLDR: in January I opposed a draft of the bill going into a committee vote, because it needed a lot of work on DeFi, tokenization, CFTC authority, and stablecoin rewards. At the time, the bill had major issues that would have harmed crypto. Support was fractured, and it wasn’t passable. We worked with a number of parties who improved the bill and made it passable. All four of the items I called out were fixed in the draft that then went through the committee about four months later. I'm proud to have done it, and would do it again, because it helped create a better bill. One step of many along the way.
The final draft of CLARITY that went to the Senate was great, and I strongly supported it. I'll continue showing up for our customers and pushing for clear rules that treat crypto fairly, even if those who feel threatened by crypto try to plant false stories. It's a shame that the WSJ takes direction from bank lobbyists instead of reporting the truth, but luckily, people are smart enough to see through it these days, and it backfires on them every time.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
The WSJ wants a blame game. It got the story wrong, again. @coinbase and @brian_armstrong have consistently fought for CLARITY and for smart policy that benefits our industry and country. Let's look at the actual facts.
On CLARITY, Coinbase advocated fiercely for our country to finally have what has been missing: comprehensive market structure. On rewards, the Ag title, the Banking title, and the entire bill, they prioritized what would best serve our industry, consumer protection, and most importantly, our country. And on rewards, Coinbase, and our industry, made real concessions, and many of them, to give this critical legislation a shot at moving forward. I was in those rooms and meetings. The compromise was real, and Coinbase helped us get there.
I've worked with Coinbase on CLARITY, and the WSJ's reporting could not be further from the truth. Time and again, I saw Coinbase make substantive recommendations, negotiate in good faith, work with the industry, serve as a resource to members of Congress, and yes, make concessions to move this process forward.
Coinbase and Brian's advocacy did not happen overnight. When the prior SEC made regulation by enforcement its playbook against our industry, Coinbase fought back. They petitioned the SEC for real rules. When they were stonewalled, they took it to the Third Circuit, which called the agency's reasoning "conclusory." They saw the SEC's enforcement case against them dismissed with prejudice. They sued under FOIA to expose the debanking campaign. To suggest that Coinbase has not put our industry first, or is somehow to blame for the failed vote, is egregiously inaccurate.
Yes, CLARITY's failed vote was deeply disappointing, but our industry is more united today than ever. A piece like this is built to manufacture division right when we're locked arm in arm and focused on next steps, including supporting the regulatory agencies that are moving quickly to provide the clarity we need. It won't work.
Coinbase has led from the front for our industry, so has Brian. These are the facts.
wsj.com/finance/currencies/c…
We need to get back to a world where Congress works to improve the lives of US voters, not just posturing vs the other party.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
...Ready for it? Time for rulemaking by agencies.
Grateful to proactive @SECPaulSAtkins @ChairmanSelig who have already stepped up to lead and excited for what is yet to come.
Back to work.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
The CLARITY Act didn't advance in the Senate today, which was a disappointment. While it's possible bi-partisan conversations continue and it lives to fight another day, we can't wait on Congress anymore.
The SEC and CFTC have the tools they need to create clear rules under existing authority, and I expect will begin working on this in earnest.
So clarity is coming to crypto regardless.
And of course GENIUS is already the law of the land for stablecoins, which is even more permissive on rewards. There were some concessions we made on CLARITY that were tough to swallow, so perhaps it's for the best.
Crypto can't be uninvented. With clarity emerging through the regulators, we'll continue updating the financial system.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
With today's Senate action, we now know four things:
1/ Today's vote mattered. After years of negotiations, it was largely a partisan vote when the music stopped. That’s unfortunate because so many people on both sides of the aisle worked hard to improve this bill. And yet, the Democrats voted as a block against the most comprehensive, bipartisan bill ever written. Maybe there will be an opportunity to bring everybody back to the table with a commitment to get a bill done — I hope so.
2/ The banks did everything in their power to kill the Clarity Act. The big banks and the small banks worked together to hand @realDonaldTrump a loss and stop financial innovation and competition in America, and they successfully put several Republicans on record as anti-crypto. This was not a zero sum game, but they made it one.
3/ The GENIUS Act is the law of the land. Anybody who wants to earn more than 0.1% on their bank account should look at other options.
4/ There’s another path, and there's zero time to waste. @ChairmanSelig and @SECPaulSAtkins have spent more than a year preparing for this moment, and they are ready to put in place rules that will enable the future of finance. It's time to get it done.
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
Today we find out who stands for American leadership in finance - and who doesn't.
The CLARITY Act delivers on every priority.
- Ethics: clear rules and real accountability
- Enforcement: full law enforcement support
- Protection: critical guardrails for everyday Americans
Huge thanks to all the Senators and millions of advocates for getting us to this point.
The crypto voter will be watching tomorrow’s vote…and taking note 📝
Travis Bloom🛡️ retweeted
Crypto voters are watching how their Senators vote tomorrow.