Policy Agenda
One agenda, two halves — we grow Wisconsin’s digital economy, and protect the people in it. Held together they are a bipartisan bridge: opportunity and trust, advanced side by side.
Pillar 01 · Growth
Innovation & Opportunity
Growing Wisconsin’s digital economy and keeping the state competitive — the industries, jobs, and infrastructure of what comes next.
Blockchain & Digital Assets
Clear, innovation-friendly rules for blockchain, staking, self-custody, and a Wisconsin home for digital-asset businesses — including the state’s own stable-token opportunity.
AI & Quantum
Positioning Wisconsin to lead on the compute-era frontier — responsible AI in industry and government, and a quantum sector that is being funded right now, mostly in other states.
Broadband, Infrastructure & Interactive Media
The rails of the digital economy — connectivity, data-center and compute infrastructure, and Wisconsin’s growing gaming, creative, and interactive-media industries.
Innovation, grounded
Infrastructure is the pillar you can stand on
Connectivity, compute, and power are what turn a policy pillar into a business anyone can actually build on. A farm with fiber is a digital-economy address; a farm without it is a market Wisconsin has written off.
Wisconsin farmstead · Photo by Caroline Gunderson on Unsplash
Pillar 01 · Growth · Compute frontier
Quantum stopped being a buzzword when it started being appropriated
The test of whether a technology is real in policy terms is not how often it is said. It is whether a legislature has put money behind it. Quantum has passed that test — just not here.
Illinois’ General Assembly approved $500 million for a quantum campus in 2024, and early state commitments now total roughly $700 million. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park has broken ground on 440 acres of the former U.S. Steel South Works site in Chicago, anchored by PsiQuantum — at least $1 billion of private investment and up to 150 jobs in its first five years — with IBM, Infleqtion and Diraq alongside it. The state’s stated projection is more than $20 billion in eventual public and private investment. That is ninety minutes from Milwaukee.
- $700MIllinois state money committed to quantum infrastructureCapitol News Illinois, 2026
- $950KWisconsin’s largest frontier-tech award — shared across AI, robotics, advanced materials and quantumWEDC Ignite Wisconsin, Feb 2026
- 200,000Quantum-economy jobs the Midwest could hold by 2035Cited by the Wis. Technology Council
Wisconsin is not short of the raw material. UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Quantum Institute is a serious research base, and spin-offs like Dirac Labs, which is building quantum sensors for navigation, are what a serious research base produces. The gap has never been the science. It has been the absence of anything that turns the science into a Wisconsin industry.
Two things moved in 2026. In February, WEDC’s first round of Ignite Wisconsin awarded $950,000 to the Wisconsin Frontier Technology Consortium — the Wisconsin Technology Council with UW–Madison, WARF, gener8tor, Waukesha County Technical College and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce — to commercialize frontier technologies, quantum computing named among them. It runs to May 2028 and targets 24 early-stage startups and more than 50 jobs. In June, the Tech Council launched the Wisconsin Quantum Alliance to build the state’s quantum workforce.
Both are the right instinct. Both are small. Wisconsin Technology Council president Maggie Brickerman’s own read is that federal quantum dollars are currently flowing to Illinois, Maryland and Colorado, and that Wisconsin has “all of these components” needed to compete — the missing step being getting the technology “out of the labs and into companies.”
We are not asking Wisconsin to outbid Illinois; that auction is over. We are asking it to stop conceding the category by default. Quantum belongs inside the same state framework as the rest of the digital economy — research commercialization, workforce, and a procurement and siting posture that gives a quantum firm a reason to look north. Illinois has already broken ground. The 2027 session is the next one in which Wisconsin can answer that.
Pillar 02 · Trust
Consumer Protection & Trust
Guarding the people in the digital economy — the rights, safeguards, and accountability that keep public trust as technology moves fast.
Data & Privacy
Strong, workable data-privacy standards that give Wisconsinites control over their information without freezing out responsible innovation.
Cybersecurity
Resilience for Wisconsin businesses, institutions, and public systems — sensible security expectations and coordinated response, not box-checking.
Consumer Protection
Disclosure, redemption, and fair-dealing standards — from crypto kiosks to digital dollars — so new financial technology earns trust with teeth behind it.
Priority · 2027 session
A Wisconsin digital dollar, built to the federal standard
Congress settled the federal question on 18 July 2025, when the GENIUS Act became law as Public Law 119‑27 and set a national standard for payment stablecoins. What it did not decide is what any given state builds on top of it. That part is Wisconsin’s call, and it is open now.
Wisconsin already has the public purpose waiting for it. The Common School Fund, administered by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, holds a principal above $1.6 billion, distributed $73.5 million in 2026, and is the sole source of state funding for Wisconsin’s public school libraries. BCPL itself notes that the fund’s traditional revenue — fines, forfeitures, unclaimed property — has eroded. Reserve income is a durable answer to that, and it is the reason this is a schools argument before it is a technology argument.
WDBC’s central ask for the next session is a state framework that keeps the opportunity here: reserves held to the federal standard, reserve income directed to public priorities, and a licensing path clear enough that the institutions capable of stewarding it can actually say yes. Every other position on this page is measured against whether it makes that possible.
Three fights that will decide 2027
The 2025–26 session adjourned on 23 March 2026, and every unpassed bill on this page died with it. That is not the same as nothing happening. The bills introduced in January 2027 are being drafted right now, and these are the three where Wisconsin’s choices will matter most.
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Digital assets
Whether Wisconsin lets you stake
Passed the Assembly once. An interim committee is drafting the 2027 version now.
AB 892 would have settled that staking a digital asset is not a securities transaction. It cleared the Assembly and stalled in the Senate. The question now sits with a Legislative Council study committee whose charge is that exact issue, which makes a 2027 bill close to certain. Federal market-structure law is still unfinished behind it — the CLARITY Act passed the U.S. House in July 2025 and has not cleared the Senate — so what Wisconsin writes will stand on its own for some time.
We testify, and we bring the businesses the bill governs into the room.
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Artificial intelligence
Who is accountable when the model decides
No statute yet. A committee is writing the standard for 2027.
AB 1109 would have barred insurers from denying prior authorization on an AI determination alone, without a licensed human reviewing it. It arrived ten days before the session ended and died with it. A study committee is now drafting standards for AI in health care and insurance. Wisconsin insurers, meanwhile, already operate under a binding AI governance mandate — issued by the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance in March 2025, entirely by bulletin, with no statute behind it.
We track it and we convene the table. Where a question splits providers from payers, an honest broker is worth more than another advocate.
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Data and privacy
The law Wisconsin still does not have
Recommended 10–0 in committee. Died on the calendar.
Wisconsin has no comprehensive consumer data privacy law. AB 172 would have created one; the Assembly Committee on State Affairs recommended it for passage on a unanimous 10–0 vote in January 2026, and it died on the Rules calendar when the session closed. Its predecessor passed the Assembly outright in 2024. The votes are demonstrably there. What is missing is a business position that the businesses themselves agree on.
We build the position that does not exist yet.
Where the 2027 bills are being written
Between sessions, Wisconsin drafts its next legislation in Legislative Council study committees — small, public, and largely unwatched. Two of them are on our beat right now, and the first of them starts taking evidence this month.
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Study Committee on Cryptocurrency
Chair: Sen. Rob Stafsholt · Vice-Chair: Rep. Nate Gustafson
Charge: whether Wisconsin’s securities laws should apply to staking services — the same question AB 892 put to the floor. The committee may also recommend legislation on other uses of cryptocurrency that, in the Legislative Council’s words, “encourages innovation and adequately protects the public.”
Now live. Staff Brief 2026‑03 was published on 11 August 2026. The committee meets for the first time on 18 August, 10:00 a.m., Room 412 East, and closes that day with a roundtable on members’ priorities — the hour that decides what the study actually covers. It meets again on 15 October in Room 411 South.
Scheduled to present on 18 August: the UW Law & Entrepreneurship Clinic; DFI’s Division of Securities, including its Enforcement Bureau; the Wisconsin Credit Union League with Corporate Central Credit Union; and the Wisconsin Bankers Association. The preliminary agenda has no digital-asset business on it. Sen. Drake, who authored the WIN Bill, sits on the committee, as do six public members: Michael Adam, Michael Bezoian, Jeni Brantner, Ryan Kamphuis, Phil Suckow and Adam Swanda.
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Study Committee on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Health Care
Chair: Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara · Vice-Chair: Rep. Adam Neylon
Charge: recommend standards for the use of AI in health care services and insurance. The Joint Legislative Council directed it to consider three things specifically: AI in the patient–provider relationship, AI between insurers or medical assistance programs and patients, and AI between those payers and providers — which is where coverage decisions are made.
Now live. Staff Brief 2026‑02 was published on 5 August 2026 and the committee meets for the first time on 13 August, 10:00 a.m., Room 411 South. That day ends with a roundtable on members’ priorities, which is where the scope of the study gets set.
Scheduled to present on 13 August: the National Conference of State Legislatures on AI health legislation nationally; a privacy attorney on state AI law; and three patient-advocacy organisations — the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources, AARP Wisconsin and NAMI Wisconsin. As on the cryptocurrency committee, no technology business is on the preliminary agenda. Sen. Keyeski and Rep. Bare sit alongside the chairs, with twelve public members.
Worth knowing before anyone drafts: Wisconsin already ran an AI study committee in 2024, and its report recommended focusing on data rather than on AI itself, and prioritizing high-risk uses over comprehensive legislation. The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance also issued a bulletin in March 2025 telling insurers to maintain a written program for responsible AI use. This committee is not writing on a blank page.
Testimony at a study committee is public, free, and on the record. It is also where a bill’s language is set, months before anyone votes on it. Showing up at the floor vote is showing up too late — which is exactly why we work here.
The Legislative Council’s own brief sets out the position Wisconsin is arguing from. In May 2025 the SEC concluded that running a validator node on someone’s behalf is administrative rather than entrepreneurial, and so fails the test that would make it a security. It then dropped its staking case against Coinbase permanently — the dismissal cannot be refiled — and Kentucky, Vermont, South Carolina and Illinois each dropped their parallel actions. Wisconsin’s DFI has neither advanced its 2023 action nor dismissed it. Coinbase offers staking in 45 states and restricts it in five; Wisconsin is one of the five.
Positions we have already taken
An agenda is worth what the record behind it is worth. These are the bills WDBC backed in the 2025–26 session, what each would have done, and what actually happened to it. All three died when the session closed — and all three are candidates to come back.
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AB 892 / SB 885
2025–26 session
Supported
Staking Clarity Act
Relating to: digital asset staking and the state’s securities laws
Would have settled in statute that staking a digital asset is not, by itself, a securities transaction under Wisconsin law. Without that line, every Wisconsin business offering staking operates on the hope that a future regulator reads the existing statute the way they do.
Reps. Neylon, Gustafson, Tranel, Tusler, Wittke, Knodl and Ortiz-Velez; Sen. Cabral-GuevaraPassed the Assembly 2/19/2026. The Senate committee recommended concurrence 3–2, but the Senate did not concur before the session closed.Bill text and history at the Legislature
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AB 471 / SB 535
2025–26 session
Supported
Crypto Clarity and Innovation Act
Relating to: the regulation of digital assets
The broad framework bill: definitions for virtual currency, digital assets, and blockchain technology, and a regulatory structure to hang them on. It is the piece that makes everything else legible — you cannot write good rules about a thing the statutes have never defined.
Reps. Neylon, Gustafson, Gundrum, Knodl, Kreibich, Krug, Tranel and Wittke; Sens. Testin and Cabral-GuevaraPublic hearing 10/1/2025. Died in committee when the session closed.Bill text and history at the Legislature
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SB 951
2025–26 session
Supported
The WIN Bill
Relating to: creating the Office of Financial Technology Innovation in the Department of Financial Institutions and a cryptocurrency pilot project
Would have given the state its own standing capacity on financial technology — an office inside DFI, plus a cryptocurrency pilot project — instead of meeting each new question cold. A state that intends to host this industry needs someone whose job it is to understand it.
Sen. Drake (D-Milwaukee); Rep. Rivera-Wagner (D-Green Bay)Introduced 2/6/2026, public hearing 2/25/2026. Failed to pass 3/23/2026 under Senate Joint Resolution 1.Bill text and history at the Legislature
Two of these were authored by Republicans and one by Democrats. That is the point: WDBC takes positions on bills, not on the people carrying them, and a digital-economy framework that only one caucus will defend is a framework that gets repealed.