Hawaii Business Magazine
May 12, 2021
If you bought a single bitcoin for $1,000 in February 2017 and sold it four years later, you’d pocket around $50,000.
But, if you lived in Hawai‘i, you probably didn’t buy Bitcoin after February 2017. That month, the digital currency exchange Coinbase ceased operations in Hawai‘i, blaming over-regulation. Local residents were given 30 days to transfer or sell their digital currency and close their accounts.
Since then, digital currency exchanges have struggled to operate in Hawai‘i, but a pilot program started in 2020 opened the door for their return. The Digital Currency Innovation Lab, a joint project of the Hawai‘i Division of Financial Institutions and the Hawaii Technology Development Corp., is a novel approach to regulation. It’s a “regulatory sandbox,” with state regulators working closely with a select group of companies and gathering data to inform decisions about how to regulate the industry moving forward.