#CryptoRoundTableRemarks Thank you and good afternoon. [1] It is a great pleasure to be with you today. Let me begin by thanking Commissioner Peirce and the Working Group on Cryptography for organizing today's event, and Commissioners Crenshaw and Uyeda for their participation. Of course, I am deeply grateful to the panelists of the roundtable and to our moderator, Troy Parades, for their time and talent voluntarily dedicated to our work.

Today's roundtable is titled "DeFi and the American Spirit." It is an apt title, as American values of economic freedom, private property, and innovation are in the DNA of the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) movement.

Blockchains, of course, are a very creative and potentially revolutionary innovation that leads us to rethink the evidence of ownership and the transfer of intellectual and economic property rights. They are shared databases that allow for the ownership of a type of digital property known as crypto-assets without relying on an intermediary or central entity. Instead, these peer-to-peer networks incorporate an economic mechanism that incentivizes participants to validate and maintain the database according to the rules of the network. These are free market systems where users pay fees according to demand to network participants for their transactions to be included in a so-called "block" of data with finite storage capacity.