Open Frontier is focused on the next generation of economic technology—the tools, systems, and infrastructure changing how people access money, data, markets, identity, and opportunity.

Open Frontier began with digital assets and blockchain technology, but now encompasses artificial intelligence, digital identity, real-time payments, tokenization, data infrastructure, privacy, cybersecurity, and agentic commerce.

Open Frontier helps policymakers and other leaders understand how these technologies are converging and develop policies that expand opportunity, protect people, encourage responsible innovation, and strengthen democratic accountability.

Trust connects artificial intelligence, crypto, blockchain, and emerging financial technology.

Modern economic systems depend on trusted identities, data, transactions, institutions, and rules. To that aim, blockchain technologies can help verify ownership, transaction history, provenance, and data integrity while artificial intelligence can analyze information, automate decisions, identify risks, and personalize services.

Together, these technologies could make financial systems more accessible, efficient, transparent, and secure. They could also create new risks involving fraud, deepfakes, opaque decisions, cybercrime, market instability, misinformation, and accountability. Open Frontier focuses on building new forms of trust while ensuring that people remain protected.

Policymakers should regulate artificial intelligence and crypto according to what a system does, the risks it creates, and the context in which it is used.

AI used for entertainment should not be treated the same as AI used for credit decisions, employment, healthcare, financial advice, defense, or law enforcement. Similarly, crypto used for payments, lending, trading, custody, or investment should be subject to protections appropriate to those functions.

Effective regulation should address consumer protection, fraud, disclosure, discrimination, privacy, cybersecurity, market integrity, financial stability, explainability, and accountability. The objective should be a clear and practical framework that protects people while allowing responsible experimentation and innovation.

A public-interest emerging technology agenda should promote innovation while protecting consumers, workers, creators, businesses, and communities.

That agenda should include:

• Clear consumer protections for digital finance.
• Stronger fraud prevention, recovery, and law enforcement tools.
• Privacy rights and greater consumer control over personal data.
• Accountability for AI systems used in consequential decisions.
• Fair compensation and protections for creators whose work supports AI systems.
• Worker training, bargaining power, and access to the benefits of increased productivity.
• Competition policies that prevent excessive concentration of data, infrastructure, and economic power.
• Responsible experimentation, regulatory sandboxes, and outcome-based oversight.
• Infrastructure policies that address energy, water, land use, heat, and community impact.

The goal should be shared prosperity, not technological progress for its own sake.

Open Frontier helps policymakers, advocates, technologists, industry leaders, and communities navigate the economic and social consequences of emerging technology.

Open Frontier does not defend every technology, company, product, or use case. The organization identifies opportunities, examines risks, clarifies trade-offs, and develops practical policy frameworks that encourage responsible innovation while protecting the public.

Open Frontier’s role is to help map the road ahead and ensure that the public interest has a meaningful voice as artificial intelligence, crypto, digital finance, and other emerging technologies reshape the economy.

Open Frontier supports both technological innovation and effective regulation.

Innovation without appropriate rules can expose consumers, workers, businesses, and communities to harm. Regulation that is unclear or unnecessarily restrictive can prevent useful technologies from developing, limit access to better tools, and push innovation into jurisdictions with weaker protections.

Open Frontier supports responsible innovation: clear rules, meaningful accountability, strong consumer protections, and enough flexibility for new technologies to solve real problems. Innovation and accountability are not competing goals and well-designed policy can advance both.

The public-interest case for artificial intelligence is that AI can help people and institutions use information more effectively, reduce costs, identify risks, and improve access to services.

In financial services, AI could strengthen fraud detection, improve compliance, make financial education more accessible, and help consumers understand products, fees, risks, and options. In other sectors, AI could automate repetitive tasks and allow people to spend more time on judgment, creativity, analysis, relationships, and problem-solving.

Artificial intelligence is a tool, not an automatic public benefit. Its impact depends on who controls it, what data it uses, what incentives shape it, and whether people have protection and recourse when it causes harm.

The public-interest case for crypto and blockchain technology is their potential to make financial systems more accessible, competitive, transparent, and efficient.

Many people and businesses still face slow payments, high fees, limited access, opaque processes, and little control over their financial data. Blockchain-based payment systems, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and real-time settlement could help people move money more quickly, reduce dependence on costly intermediaries, improve auditability, and create new forms of digital trust.

The strongest public interest case for crypto is not financial speculation. It is the potential to improve access, competition, transparency, ownership, and control while maintaining strong protections against fraud and abuse.

Artificial intelligence and crypto overlap most clearly in digital identity, fraud prevention, data integrity, compliance, and agentic commerce.

Cryptographic tools can help verify identities, transactions, data provenance, and whether digital information has been altered. AI can analyze large datasets, detect suspicious patterns, automate compliance, and identify emerging risks.

The overlap will become especially important as AI agents begin making purchases, transferring funds, negotiating agreements, or completing other transactions for people and businesses. Those systems will require reliable ways to verify authorization, establish identity, track activity, assign liability, and provide recourse when something goes wrong.