El Salvadors Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales (CNAD), the agency responsible for regulating digital assets in the Central American Nation, is trying to establish a cross-border regulatory sandbox with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“We want to create international cooperation,” Juan Carlos Reyes, President of Cnad, told Coindesk in an interview. “Our biggest message is that digital assets have no geographical barriers. Collaboration with regulators should also not have international barriers.”

El Salvador is in a unique situation as it does not boast of strong financial institutions or even of an existing ecosystem of developers when President Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin Legal Tender in 2021. This means CNAD was able to start with an empty slate when it introduced a regulatory framework tailored to crypto.

Almost two years later, after Reyes took over the agency, El Salvador’s advanced regulatory framework has incentive crypto giants such as Tether, BitFinex and Binance to Open Store in the country.

The idea, Reyes said, is that the American SEC is now using El Salvador as a live case study in the real world to evaluate streamlined regulatory approaches to digital assets-with other words for SEC to learn from El Salvador’s experience as it revammed its own regulatory setting in a post-Gensler world.

The pilot program suggested by CNAD involves different scenarios: an American-licensed traditional funding broker that achieves a digital asset license according to CNAD rules, and the development of two small-scale-tokenization offers facilitated by a CNAD-licensed tokenization company. Each scenario would be uncovered at $ 10,000.

These initiatives would support some of the goals set by SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce in February when she wrote that SEC Crypto Task Force, which she is now leading, would take a very different approach to crypto regulation from here and out.

“Cnad really looked at [Pierce’s document] With a critical eye on how we can help, ”said Erica Perkin, owner of the Perkin lawn company and a member of CNAD’s advisory group, Coindesk.” We’re here. There is data [the SEC] may want to collect. It is difficult to gather in the US … We have built a framework that is fast enough to work on the exact problems that SEC looks at and we are here to help and collect information on how we can best do it. “

CNAD met with SEC’s Crypto Task Force on April 22 to discuss the initiative. The meeting was constructive according to Reyes and Perkin. “They asked good questions,” Perkin said. “They are in an information collection phase. They were committed and open for discussion.”

Reyes has already signed legislative cooperation agreements with countries such as Argentina and Paraguay. In his view, SEC seems to be ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding the regulatory needs for digital assets, while supervisory authorities in other jurisdictions have tended to see crypto regulation from a traditional financing perspective.

“The quality of people who make up the SEC Crypto Task Force is quite impressive. They get it. They understand the technology,” Reyes said. “We were able to have discussions that were at the forefront of what was needed to regulate the technology … It was very refreshing.”