Bermuda Takes Its Digital-Asset Pitch to Washington as the US Finally Writes Its Own Rules

Premier David Burt met the heads of the SEC and the CFTC at DC Fintech Week, selling a decade-old licensing regime to a market that is only now deciding how to regulate the thing Bermuda already supervises.

Bermuda has spent eight years supervising digital-asset companies under a law it wrote in 2018. This week its government went to Washington to argue that the experience should count for something now that the United States is, at last, deciding how to regulate the same industry. Premier and Finance Minister David Burt led a delegation to DC Fintech Week and met Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins and Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig, along with executives from Coinbase, Ripple, Ondo Finance and BlackRock (The Royal Gazette, October 16).

The pitch is straightforward. Bermuda's Digital Asset Business Act and the supervisory apparatus of the Bermuda Monetary Authority predate the current American rulemaking by most of a decade, and the island wants global firms to treat its license as a stable base while Washington's framework takes shape. The numbers Burt carried are modest in absolute terms but point in the right direction: the number of licensed digital-asset businesses on the island rose to 49 at the end of 2025, up from 36 a year earlier (The Royal Gazette, October 16). 'Responsible innovation is best achieved through partnership between government, regulators and industry,' Burt said, a line calibrated to reassure the compliance officers who decide where this money domiciles.

Why the timing matters

For most of the past five years the American posture toward crypto was defined by enforcement rather than rulemaking, and that ambiguity was, perversely, Bermuda's opening. A firm that could not get a clear answer in New York could get a license, a named supervisor and a rulebook in Hamilton. The risk for the island now is the opposite of the one it has lived with. If the SEC and the CFTC produce a workable domestic framework, the regulatory arbitrage that drew companies offshore narrows, and a small jurisdiction has to compete on service, speed and credibility rather than on being the only adult in the room. Burt's trip reads as an attempt to get ahead of that shift, to convert a first-mover position into a durable one before the largest market in the world opens its own front door.

There is a hard-nosed fiscal logic beneath the diplomacy. Bermuda does not levy a corporate income tax of the ordinary kind, and it funds its government through payroll taxes, customs duties and fees. A deeper bench of licensed financial firms means more high-paying jobs on an island where the cost of living is punishing, and more fee income for a treasury that has spent recent years trying to repair its balance sheet. Every firm that plants a regulated entity in Hamilton is a small annuity for the public finances, which is why a premier spends a week in Washington shaking hands with regulators rather than sending a letter.

The competitive map

Bermuda is not alone in the trade. The Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and, in a different register, the Bahamas have all built or attempted to build digital-asset regimes, and the Bahamas carries the scar tissue of having hosted FTX before its 2022 collapse. That history is part of Bermuda's implicit pitch. The island can point to a supervisory record that, so far, has avoided a marquee blowup, and in this industry an absence of catastrophe is a selling point worth advertising. The meetings with Coinbase, Ripple and BlackRock matter precisely because those are the firms whose domicile choices signal the market. If the largest, most compliance-sensitive players treat a Bermuda license as a credential rather than a shortcut, the smaller firms follow.

It helps that Bermuda is not selling this from a standing start. The island is one of the world's major reinsurance centers, the place where a large share of global catastrophe risk is underwritten, and that gives its regulators a credibility in complex financial supervision that a pure crypto jurisdiction cannot buy. The digital-asset pitch rides on that reputation. The specific prize Burt is chasing is the institutional end of the market, the tokenization of real-world assets and the dollar-backed stablecoins that firms like BlackRock and Ondo Finance are building, because that is the business that wants a serious, boring, well-supervised home rather than a light-touch one. A jurisdiction known for disciplined insurance regulation is positioned to argue it can supervise tokenized money with the same seriousness, and that argument is worth more to a pension-fund compliance officer than any tax advantage.

What Bermuda cannot control is the shape of the American rules themselves. A framework that is strict but clear would, counterintuitively, help the island, because clarity lets global firms build multi-jurisdiction structures in which a Bermuda entity has a defined role. A framework that is loose and cheap would hurt it, by making the offshore option redundant. Burt's delegation can make the case for partnership, but the decisive votes are cast in Washington, by Atkins and Selig and the Congress behind them. The premier flew home having been in the room. In a regulatory contest that is still being written, being in the room when the pen moves is most of what a small jurisdiction can ask for, and more than it often gets.