The Bitcoin Policy Institute states that it was established in 2021, that it is a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit with EIN 88-1567390, and that it works from Washington, D.C. The IRS record matches the tax status and the number, lists the organisation as tax-exempt since July 2022, and gives a Nashville, Tennessee address. A 501(c)(3) may educate and may lobby only within limits, which is the practical difference between BPI and a trade association.
Its self-description is narrow by design: research and advocacy on Bitcoin specifically, rather than on digital assets as a category, aimed at policymakers and presented as non-partisan. The published work runs to papers, explainers and testimony on subjects such as mining and grid demand, self-custody and surveillance, the treatment of open-source developers, and the arguments for and against a government bitcoin reserve.
The team page lists David Zell as president, Grant McCarty as executive director and Conner Brown as managing director, with heads of policy, research and government affairs, and Matthew Pines on the board of directors. That is a small staff for the volume of output, and much of the writing is done by named fellows and outside authors rather than by employees, which is worth knowing when reading a BPI paper: the byline, not the masthead, tells you who made the argument.
Two things follow from the structure. First, BPI is one of very few Washington organisations that argue about Bitcoin without also representing token issuers or exchanges, so its position on market structure legislation is not the industry's position by default. Second, being a charity rather than a business league caps how much of its budget can go to lobbying, so the lever it pulls is publication and briefing rather than campaign spending.