Filecoin Foundation Chair Marta Belcher Testifies Before US Senate Banking Committee

Filecoin Foundation Board Chair Marta Belcher testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on July 27 in a hearing titled “Cryptocurrencies: What are they good for?” Marta’s testimony highlighted the benefits of cryptocurrency and explained Filecoin as one example of a use case that could serve as the foundation for the next generation of the Internet.

Marta explained that cryptocurrency can make it possible to send monetary value across the globe instantly and securely, and the importance of the ability to program money. She explained that this technology can be used to create a decentralized storage network that serves as “an alternative to big tech that puts people in control of their own data, protects user privacy and security, and permanently preserves humanity’s most important information.”

During the hearing, three Senators commented on Filecoin’s potential.

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) noted that Filecoin “provides data storage and access on a decentralized file network and seeks to compete with AWS. This is just one of the many promising uses for cryptocurrencies.”

Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) said “it’s possible that the application of this [distributed ledger technology] may become more important than cryptocurrency per se, and we’re already seeing it have a real world impact. . . . Today we’ll hear . . . [about] a cryptocurrency, Filecoin, that provides data storage access on a decentralized file storage network.”

Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said that “some of these underlying technologies may have useful applications . . . One of these technologies we’ll hear about today, Filecoin, uses economic incentives to provide digital storage space.”

Marta urged the committee to think expansively about cryptocurrency’s potential: “This technology is in its early days, and this stage of development for cryptocurrency is often compared to the Internet of the early ’90s. It would have been a mistake, in 1995, to believe that we understood then what the Internet was good for. I would urge the Committee to embrace the possibility that cryptocurrency’s uses might be just as expansive, and to ensure that innovation in this space can continue to thrive.”

Read Marta’s oral testimony, and watch the full hearing here.