Cody Carbone likes a list. Faced with the fog of digital-asset policy, he reduces the work to verbs: pass, clarify, expand, rescind. The habit is useful in Washington, where the distance between a slogan and a statute can be measured in years, committee calendars and the patience required to explain the same idea for the forty-seventh time.
As Chief Executive Officer of The Digital Chamber, Carbone represents a coalition that includes exchanges, custodians, banks, infrastructure companies, developers and investors. They share an interest in workable rules. They do not necessarily share the same preferred rules. His job is to locate the overlap, translate it into language policymakers can use and keep the coalition together while Congress does what Congress does.
The role arrived at an unusually favorable moment. Carbone became CEO in April 2025, after serving as the organization's president and chief policy officer. Founder Perianne Boring moved to chair the board. The Chamber described the transition as a move from defense to offense, a sporting metaphor for a decidedly unsporting business: explaining licensing frameworks, jurisdictional lines and tax treatment in rooms where every sentence can become a negotiation.
The education of an educator
Carbone's preparation for this moment was less cinematic than cumulative. He earned a bachelor's degree at SUNY Cortland, then completed both a law degree and a Master of Public Administration at Syracuse University. He worked in policy roles in the House and Senate before joining EY's Office of Public Policy in 2016. There, he spent six years on federal advocacy involving financial services and emerging technologies.
A small episode from 2019 explains the method. Carbone hosted Syracuse public-policy students at EY's Washington office and described his work as education: bringing facts to Capitol Hill and federal agencies, then arguing from the common interests shared by client and policymaker. The description lacks the velvet-rope mystique often attached to influence. It makes lobbying sound like a difficult seminar where the syllabus keeps changing. That may be closer to the truth.
He joined The Digital Chamber in 2022 as policy director. The promotions came quickly: vice president of policy, chief policy officer, president, then CEO. The titles changed, but the basic function survived. He was still translating a fast-moving technical industry for institutions designed to move slowly.
Inside the legislature
Policy work in the U.S. House and Senate.
Learning the policy machinery
Six years at EY, representing financial-services and emerging-technology interests.
Building the brief
A rise through The Digital Chamber's policy leadership.
Taking the chief executive seat
A mandate to turn political access into legislation and regulatory clarity.
“A lot done, but a lot of work to do. We need legislation still.”Cody Carbone, 2025
The moment the door opened
Carbone's arrival as CEO coincided with a reversal in Washington's posture toward crypto. Agencies created new forums, congressional groups took shape and policymakers began asking industry representatives for proposals rather than rebuttals. He described the atmosphere as a mixture of chaotic energy and optimism. The phrase carries both excitement and warning. An open door creates access, but it also creates a queue.
His answer was a short policy stack. Stablecoin legislation came first, followed by rules to divide responsibility for digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Then came tax clarity, a broader bipartisan coalition and changes to executive-branch ethics guidance. The list was practical enough to fit on a notepad and ambitious enough to occupy a Congress.
Stablecoins show how he works. Carbone explains them through the mechanics: liquid reserves, state or federal licenses, disclosures, audits and restrictions on how backing assets can be used. Then he moves to the human argument. In Senate testimony in June 2026, he said moving money should become as simple as sending an email. His case focused on the quiet price of financial friction: merchant fees, slow transfers, costly access and the lag between earning money and being able to use it.
Carbone's rule-writing stack
Market structure requires another kind of translation. Carbone reduces the question to a map: if a company issues or lists a token, which regulator governs the activity, and under what conditions? His concern is that a framework aimed at protecting markets can inadvertently exile early-stage projects. He has argued for disclosure-based pathways that allow newer networks to develop without pretending every project begins fully decentralized.
That stance reveals the balancing act. The Chamber includes mature companies, yet Carbone argues they depend on the pipeline of founders and experiments behind them. A trade association can easily become a museum for incumbents. His public position is that it should also keep the door open for the next company still working from a basement or garage.
The coalition has sharp elbows
Unity is easier when everyone shares an opponent. As the policy environment warmed, old divisions within crypto became louder: centralized companies against decentralized projects, legacy finance against startups, one network against another. Carbone has been blunt about the spectacle. He called the infighting tribal, bizarre and nasty. His joke was sharper: competitors should stop tweeting at one another like high-school students and let the market decide.
The humor matters because the criticism is serious. A coalition that arrives in Washington with five mutually hostile messages has not brought policymakers a choice; it has given them permission to wait. Carbone's members-first language is a discipline as much as a motto. The association must synthesize positions without disguising real disagreement, then communicate a view sturdy enough to survive questions from both parties.
His style is more conversational than solemn. When an interviewer once offered him an open floor, Carbone warned that giving him room to discuss New Jersey was dangerous, then called it the greatest state in the Union. He followed the joke with a civics lesson: business owners and consumers should visit Washington and tell their representatives why digital assets matter to them. Lawmakers, he said, pay more attention to constituents than outsiders imagine.
“You'd be amazed at how much lawmakers pay attention to the voices of their constituents.”Cody Carbone
Making momentum survive
The CEO title has widened Carbone's stage. He testified before a House subcommittee in 2025 about studying blockchain applications for veterans' services. A year later, he appeared before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss affordability and financial access. At conferences and in interviews, he has kept returning to the same legislative arithmetic: language, timing, amendments and the votes required to close debate.
By August 2026, he was publicly working through the path for market-structure legislation, including negotiations over ethics provisions and the need to assemble sixty Senate votes. This is where political optimism meets procedure. A favorable administration can set the mood. A coalition can draft principles. Neither can skip cloture.
Carbone's stated aspiration is American leadership in digital assets. The less ceremonial version is more interesting: rules clear enough that a founder can raise capital, a bank can hold an asset, a regulator can identify misconduct and a consumer can understand the risk. Clarity is a dull word until its absence becomes expensive.
His policy case also reaches beyond the usual picture of crypto as an asset bought and sold on an exchange. He talks about payment networks, remittances, digital identity and records that can be verified across institutions. The point is not that a blockchain improves every system. In his 2026 Senate testimony, he explicitly acknowledged that digital assets could not solve every pressure facing households. The narrower claim is more credible: in places where intermediaries, reconciliation and delay create costs, new rails may introduce useful competition.
That qualification is part of the translation job. Washington has heard enough technological promises delivered in the future tense. Carbone tends to connect the larger vision to a particular piece of policy, then describe the guardrails alongside the opportunity. Reserves accompany stablecoins. Disclosures accompany fundraising. Federal oversight accompanies a national market. The pitch works by admitting that adoption requires constraints, not merely enthusiasm.
He also wants the framework to last. A partisan victory can be reversed by the next election. A negotiated statute, supported by both parties and understood by agencies, has a better chance of becoming ordinary infrastructure. This helps explain his insistence on coalition-building even when the political wind appears friendly. Weather is not architecture.
There is a tidy symmetry to his career. The young policy professional told Syracuse students that advocacy began with education, common interests and prepared facts. The chief executive now runs the same play at a larger scale, for an industry richer in acronyms and rivalries than most. The room is bigger. The lesson plan remains.
Washington finally became willing to talk about writing the rules. Carbone's work begins where the talking ends: at the clause, the compromise and the count.