SEN. JON HUSTED: America’s Next Frontier Is Building Pro-Innovation Framework For Digital Assets

Ohio has a long history of producing people who attempt what others insist cannot be done. When two bicycle mechanics from Dayton argued that human flight was possible, the response was fear — warnings about danger, disorder, and defying nature. When an Ohio inventor promoted electric light, critics predicted fires, chaos, and threats to public safety. History settled the argument anyway. Flight shrank the world, electricity powered modern life, and the warnings that once dominated debate now read like footnotes.

The lesson is simple: caution matters, but fear disguised as prudence can quietly stop progress.

But America’s tradition of innovation is not limited to factories or the physical world. The same instinct that once powered flight and electrification is now driving a new wave of digital innovation through blockchain and decentralized finance. These technologies have the potential to give working families and small businesses greater control over their finances—moving money faster, at lower cost, and with stronger security—if fear, regulation and regulators do not succeed in stalling progress before the benefits are realized.

Yet Washington is still trying to regulate this technology using laws written in the 1930s, and that’s holding America back. China, the European Union, and Singapore are already adapting to this new reality and America faces a choice: lead the world in building the next generation of the internet or let other nations set the standards and write the rules while we argue about definitions.

The choice should be clear, but under former Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown, Congress blocked the innovators trying to build America’s future. For years, Brown had the power to lead but chose to obstruct. He refused to bring forward meaningful legislation, ignored bipartisan proposals, and treated blockchain entrepreneurs like criminals instead of innovators. While other nations rolled out the red carpet for digital-asset companies, Brown rolled out red tape. That’s not leadership, it’s negligence. And it cost Ohio and America jobs, investment, and our technological edge.

Fortunately, Ohio rejected Brown, and the new Republican leadership on the Banking Committee understands what Brown never did. Digital asset technology represents the next wave of economic opportunity for working families. Blockchain and decentralized finance (DeFi) means faster paychecks, lower costs, and fairer access to credit. They mean small-business owners can raise money without going through Wall Street and they allow small businesses to send payments in seconds instead of days. They allow a single mom to send money across town, or across the world, in seconds without losing a day’s wages in fees. They cut out the middlemen who take a bite out of every paycheck and help families keep more of what they earn. They can protect American manufacturers from counterfeit products, reduce fraud, secure digital identities, and give creators real ownership of their work online. They can even help farmers manage supply chains and bring transparency to global trade.