The recent announcement that Gary Gensler will lead Joseph Biden’s financial policy transition team signals an interesting development in the incoming administration’s position on cryptocurrencies and other digital assets. Gensler, who was previously chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama administration, has considerable street cred in the cryptocurrency arena. As a faculty member at MIT, he directs the FinTech program in the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) and serves on the board of the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative. In these roles, he mentors graduate students and conducts research on blockchain technology, digital currencies, and macroeconomic policy.

By John Murray, Research Director, Linqto Inc. In the mid-twentieth century, political scientist Joseph Schumpeter developed the theoretical basis for the business phenomenon that he called “creative destruction,” where technological advances launch…