Kai R. Black

Kai R. Black has been building on-chain infrastructure since 2016. He was present for the DAO hack, for the first DeFi summer, for the collapse of algorithmic stablecoins, and for the regulatory responses that followed each of these events. He has read every major piece of stablecoin legislation produced by the United States Congress, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. His assessment of each is consistent: the authors do not understand the systems they are regulating, and the technical assumptions embedded in the legislation are wrong in ways that will produce outcomes the legislators did not intend.

This is not a political position. It is a technical observation. The GENIUS Act defines payment stablecoins in terms of their economic function while remaining agnostic about their technical architecture. That agnosticism is not neutral. Every technical architecture choice made by a stablecoin issuer has regulatory and systemic implications that the Act's definitional framework cannot see. Kai Black writes about what those choices are, what they imply, and what the gap between legislative intent and technical reality will produce when it closes.

He writes from Lisbon, where the European crypto builder community has concentrated. He came up through American developer culture and writes in American English. He has no patience for hedging.