companies about their jobs, how their firm fits into the crypto ecosystem, and what it all means for how we use money.

Just when crypto legislation was gaining steam in Washington, FTX’s collapse and the arrest of former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried stained the industry’s reputation and made many lawmakers unwilling to engage. Nearly a year later, things are starting to look up and Coinbase is helping lead the charge to advocate for crypto in D.C.

After its NFT shield mint raised $215,000 for crypto advocacy organizations earlier this year, the company helped start the independent Stand with Crypto Alliance as a nonprofit meant to inspire grassroots support in the U.S.

Fortune caught up with Coinbase’s chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, to learn more about what the company is doing to help advance crypto legislation and how lawmakers’ opinions have shifted since FTX’s downfall.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

I wanted to start off with just asking you a little bit about your background, your career, and how you first got interested in crypto.

I have a very Washington career. I grew up, professionally, kind of always around public policy and government issues. I was a lawyer for a number of years. Then I was a staffer on the Senate Finance Committee, working on international trade matters. I then went to the Bush-Cheney transition team and managed the transition between the Clinton and the Bush administrations, then had a number of roles in the administration.

I was at Goldman Sachs for a number of years before I came to Coinbase, and I obviously heard about crypto like most people do. But I didn’t really dig deep into it until I was having conversations with Brian Armstrong and Emilie [Choi] and others at Coinbase about coming over. And the more I dug into it, the more I was intrigued and wanted to be a part of figuring out the public policy around crypto.

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