Overview

The digital assets market has grown significantly in recent years, bringing potential opportunities and harms alongside it. Recognizing these possibilities, President Biden signed Executive Order (EO) 14067, Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets, which outlined the first whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology.

As part of this work, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recommended that the U.S. Government develop and periodically update a National Digital Assets Research and Development (R&D) Agenda. OSTP found that there were several important and open questions related to digital assets research, which could benefit from increased attention and support. These R&D questions span a wide range of sociotechnical aspects, from technical innovations to social, behavioral, and economic aspects, germane to advancing digital assets while seeking to ensure that diverse groups, including underrepresented and marginalized groups, can access and use digital assets in a secure, privacy-preserving, inclusive, and equitable manner. They also span the full spectrum of foundational to use-inspired to translational research coordinated by the NITRD program.

In October 2022, OSTP charged NITRD to create a Digital Assets R&D (DARD) Fast-Track Action Committee (FTAC), with membership across the Federal Government, to develop the National Digital Assets R&D Agenda. As recommended by OSTP, this work will include a focus on advancing research that could be helpful to Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) experimentation and development at the Federal Reserve, as well as both foundational and translational R&D relevant to digital assets technology more broadly (e.g., cryptography, programmability, cybersecurity and privacy protections, environmentally sustainable technologies).

This FTAC is charted to be co-chaired by OSTP and the National Science Foundation, with broad and inclusive membership across Federal agencies. In the course of its work, the FTAC will solicit public and expert input at multiple points.

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Membership

The FTAC is co-chaired by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation. The FTAC includes representatives from across the Federal Government, bringing a whole-of-government approach to advancing digital assets research and development.
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Co-Chairs

Alan Mislove Alan Mislove
Assistant Director for Data and Democracy
Science and Society Division
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
Anna Squicciarini Anna Squicciarini
Program Director
Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)
Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)
National Science Foundation
Anna Brady-Estevez Anna Brady-Estevez
Program Director
Chemical Technologies (CT)
Distributed Ledger (DL)
Energy Technologies (EN)
Power Management (PM)
Space (SP)
National Science Foundation

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References

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