A senior executive of cryptocurrency firm Coinbase – which has offices in Hamilton – has called the signing of the American Genius Act a monumental achievement.

Officially known as the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, the Bill establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoin.

On July 15, it became the first such Bill to be passed in the US.

Coinbase’s chief financial officer, Alesia Haas, said: “We are really excited because the Bill saw major bipartisan support. It is the first step on the road to making the United States the crypto capital of the world.”

Ms Haas was speaking in a fireside chat with Oppenheimer analyst Owen Lau at the Oppenheimer 28th Annual Technology, internet and Communications Conference.

During the discussion, Ms Haas also touched on the Clarity Act, now waiting to pass the US Senate. It assigns the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the authority to regulate digital commodities, while the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees securities.

There has long been debate in the US over whether cryptocurrency is a security or a commodity. The Bill attempts to answer the question.

“We are really excited for the progress that we are seeing with Clarity,” Ms Haas said. “We remain optimistic that we will see it pass into law by the end of the year, but the timing is uncertain.”

Ms Haas also gave an update on Coinbase’s growth in the past year.

“We are first looking at growth in trading,” she said. “About 40 per cent of our revenue comes from subscription services. About 60 per cent in the last recent quarter was with our trading businesses.”

She thought Coinbase was ready for every asset class to become a tokenised asset.

“Our customers are asking for this,” she said. “The regulatory environment is ready to have these talks about what it means to bring assets on chain, and the technology is ready.”

Coinbase has long wanted to become a place where people can trade different types of assets.

“As of Q2 we offered over 300 assets for spot trading,” Ms Haas said. “Last week the firm began to expand access to millions of cryptoassets by integrating decentralised exchange trading into the Coinbase app.”

Coinbase has also been focused on international expansion and recently secured its Markets in Cryptoassets Regulation licence, allowing it to operate in the European Union.

The firm has also raised fees for some stablecoin pairs.

“Previously, we had very low or no fees on stable pair trades,” Ms Haas said. “We saw some traders were bringing large amounts of tether to our platform, converting it to USDC, and then converting it to fiat. They were using our infrastructure for free and taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity.”

Coinbase decided to optimise for trading revenue over volume.

“That led us to increase fees on these large-volume, stablecoin pair trades,” she said. “That effectively ended that arbitrage activity. We added these fees to create some friction in that trading.”