Caitlin Long: New Wyoming Law Will Protect Privacy of Wallet Keys

Caitlin Long, a member of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, hinted at two new prospective state laws she believes will be highly popular among cryptocurrency developers and owners.

In an interview during Peter McCormack’s podcast on Sept. 27, the 22-year Wall Street veteran and cryptocurrency activist reflected on the pioneering crypto legislation already passed — and reportedly planned — in her home turf, the United States state of Wyoming.

New laws would protect blockchain developers as well as privacy of wallet keys

According to Long, the first of the two new laws to reportedly be proposed will state that:

“Anyone in the state of Wyoming cannot be compelled in a criminal or civil or administrative or legislative hearing or anything, any other proceeding to disclose [their] private keys.”

The second, she continued, would bolster protections for open-source developers and ensure that they cannot be prosecuted solely on the basis of misuse of the code they have written. 

She underscored that if the law passes, developers will not be “criminally prosecuted solely for having written code” nor be held liable for others’ use of their code, malicious or otherwise.

A potted history of Wyoming’s crypto legislation

As previously reported, America’s least populous state has approved a steady stream of proactive blockchain and cryptocurrency-related legislations.

At the end of January, Wyoming Senate passed a bill — later passed by the House on Feb. 14 — that allows for cryptocurrencies to be recognized as money. The bill places crypto assets into three categories: digital consumer assets, digital securities and virtual currencies.

Also in January, Wyoming passed a bill defining certain open blockchain tokens as intangible personal property, as well as a bill pertaining to the creation of a fintech regulatory sandbox.

This February, Wyoming passed two further blockchain-related bills on tokenization and issues with compliance.

In early 2018 both the Wyoming Senate and House of Representatives passed a bill that relaxed securities regulations and money transmission laws for certain tokens offered via an initial coin offering (ICO) in the state.

A separate house bill regarding the exemption of virtual currencies from the Wyoming Money Transmitter Act was passed by the Wyoming state legislature in March 2018, as well as a house bill exempting virtual currencies from state property taxation in February. Yet, further pro-crypto and blockchain senate and house bills had already been passed into Wyoming law.

Earlier this month, Long responded to the recent unrest in the money markets with an analysis of the systemic fragility of the traditional financial sector as compared with Bitcoin (BTC).