From NFL to Congress: One Lawmaker's Approach to Regulating Crypto

Executive overview

Most lawmakers regulating crypto have never used it. Anthony Gonzalez — former Ohio State wide receiver, Colts NFL player, Stanford GSB grad, and startup COO — actually played around in DeFi before legislating. He sits on the House Financial Services Committee and has been one of the few members pushing for thoughtful, bipartisan crypto frameworks.

His throughline: regulate the way Clinton handled the early internet — do no harm, take bite-sized pieces as you understand them, and don't overreach before the technology has had a chance to develop.

The right regulatory posture for emerging technology is: legislate what you understand, stay silent on what you don't, and never destroy an industry before most people can grasp what it is.

From the NFL to Congress

• Drafted by the Indianapolis Colts in the first round; caught passes from Peyton Manning
• Injuries derailed his career in his third year; attended a Harvard Business School program during that period and knew immediately he'd go to business school
• Applied to Stanford GSB from his locker room during his final preseason game
• After GSB, joined a venture-backed startup backed by the Investment Group of Santa Barbara (iGSB)
• Ran for Congress in 2018, framing it as a startup: customer interviews, a Salesforce fundraising dashboard, coalition-building from first principles
• Message focused on economic decline in Northeast Ohio — steel plants closing, jobs leaving — rather than culture-war politics
• Raised ~$600k in the first month to signal momentum; treated fundraising like a sales pipeline

January 6th and the impeachment vote

• Arrived at the Capitol early on January 6th; the Mall was already packed with buses from across the country
• Watched from the balcony as Ted Cruz objected; left the chamber and witnessed the breach beginning
• Barricaded in his office in jeans and running shoes, lights off, fielding calls to the White House that went unanswered for nearly three hours
• Voted to impeach — one of 10 House Republicans — because he believed every future president must know the act is impeachable
• Knew it would cost him his seat politically; planned to fight for reelection anyway, but ultimately decided not to run after weighing what kind of life he and his family wanted

Crypto: how Congress actually works on it

• About 90% of Congress members have heard of crypto but don't understand it; ~5% are getting up to speed; ~5% have gone deep
• Committees are where real work happens — members bring expertise and pull the other 90% with them on complex issues
• Gonzalez spent months going deep on L1s, L2s, DeFi, DAOs; played with a small amount of real ETH and donated the proceeds to the United Way
• Found he learned more in weeks of hands-on use than in months of reading white papers
• The infrastructure bill's crypto tax provision — accidentally sweeping in all developers as "brokers" — was a wake-up call for the whole Congress about how bad unexamined legislation can be

The regulatory framework: do no harm

• Clinton's approach to the early internet — let it breathe, understand it, then regulate — is the right model
• Stablecoins are the most tractable first piece: define a "payment stablecoin" as fiat-backed, set reserve requirements, auditing standards, and redemption protections
• Algorithmic stablecoins are harder — not clear whether they're securities, commodities, or something else; better to stay silent than legislate poorly
• Terra Luna collapse was useful: it forced members to understand the fiat-backed vs. algorithmic distinction and galvanized bipartisan action
• FTX operating from the Bahamas is a direct consequence of US regulatory uncertainty — the goal should be to bring that innovation home
• The SEC's posture under its then-chair was more hostile than Congress's; passing even non-enacted bills with bipartisan support sends regulators a signal

NIL and college athletics

• College athletes were the only people in America barred from monetizing their name, image, and likeness — even teaching swim lessons
• After the NCAA lost at the Supreme Court, it stopped enforcing its own NIL rules, creating a Wild West of boosters forming collectives to recruit players
• Collective deals reportedly run to $8M for quarterbacks, but terms are opaque and agents may be taking outsized commissions with no transparency
• If college athletics fully professionalizes, most schools will cut every sport that doesn't generate revenue except what's required under Title IX
• Gonzalez has pushed for a national federal standard — legalize NIL with guardrails on recruiting inducements — for two consecutive Congresses

American dynamism and industrial policy

• The real lesson of 2016 in Northeast Ohio wasn't cultural backlash — it was an economic story: car plants gone, LTV Steel hollowed out, communities decaying
• Three goals for the economy: sustainable, dynamic, and resilient — and COVID exposed how badly pure efficiency optimization destroys resilience
• On dynamism: the US should lead in every critical technology; regulatory uncertainty is pushing founders and exchanges offshore
• On resilience: not everything needs reshoring, but critical supply chains — semiconductors, rare earth minerals, advanced manufacturing — should be domestic or with close allies
• American manufacturing often has lower energy intensity than Chinese manufacturing; the right move is to innovate clean alternatives so cheap that developing economies will adopt them voluntarily
• The CHIPS Act and Intel's Ohio fab investment are a proof of concept; Columbus is developing a software/insurance tech cluster around Drive Capital
• No private company can underwrite a 50-year R&D project; government must fund the foundational work

On democracy and the real political divide

• The actual divide isn't Republican vs. Democrat — it's people who believe in American democracy vs. those who tear it down when they don't get their way
• Both parties now have vocal minorities who default to burning institutions when they lose; Gonzalez sees this as a gift to China and Russia
• Primary turnout of ~20% is the root cause of political extremism; moving it to 50% would moderate Congress more than almost any structural reform
• Most congressional districts are so gerrymandered that the primary is the only competitive election — and fewer people vote in it than almost any other race