New York enacted a two-year moratorium on new cryptocurrency mining permits in 2022 — the first state-level action of its kind in the United States — while directing regulators to evaluate the environmental effects of proof-of-work mining operations. The policy was a direct response to the strain that mining companies had placed on the state’s electricity infrastructure after initially clustering around cheap hydroelectric power from the New York Power Authority’s St. Lawrence River facility.

In January 2024, the U.S. Energy Information Administration obtained emergency clearance from the Office of Management and Budget to collect electricity consumption data from cryptocurrency mining facilities. In February 2024, it issued a formal request for comments on extending the data collection. On March 1, 2024, it withdrew the effort entirely — the result of a legal challenge from Bitcoin mining companies and a negotiated settlement in which EIA agreed to destroy the data it had already gathered.

Decentralized finance has operated for years in a regulatory environment that is, by any honest assessment, unresolved. No overarching legislative or regulatory framework specifically governs defi. Existing laws — the Bank Secrecy Act, securities statutes, commodities regulations — were written before the technology existed and have been applied to it through guidance, enforcement actions, and legal interpretations that have shifted substantially depending on the administration in office.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network established in 2019 guidance that money transmitter regulations apply to decentralized applications when those apps perform money transmission, stating that the rules apply “regardless of label.” A small number of defi entities have registered with any federal regulator, and Treasury acknowledged in a 2023 report that there is likely limited compliance with BSA/AML requirements across the sector. The gap between stated regulatory obligation and actual compliance is not ambiguous — it is documented.

The Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation came into full effect in the European Union at the end of 2024, completing a legislative process that began in 2020. MiCA is, by any measure, the most comprehensive crypto regulatory framework enacted by any major jurisdiction. It is also, by the assessment of most practitioners who have spent the past year implementing compliance against it, a framework with genuine strengths, notable gaps, and implementation details that will be litigated for years.

Cryptocurrency legislation in the United States has been promised, debated, drafted, amended, shelved, redrafted, and promised again so many times that the industry had largely stopped treating legislative progress as meaningful until a bill reached the floor. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act’s passage out of committee with bipartisan support is a different moment. It does not guarantee enactment, but it represents the closest the United States has come to a comprehensive crypto regulatory framework since the asset class became economically significant.

For most of the past decade, crypto companies operating in the United States have been navigating regulatory uncertainty using a combination of legal creativity, jurisdictional arbitrage, and optimism that clarity would eventually arrive. The SEC’s enforcement-first approach — pursuing actions against specific actors rather than publishing comprehensive guidance — left the industry in the position of learning the rules from the outcomes of cases it was not party to.

The taxonomic guidance that the SEC published in early 2026 does not resolve every question. It resolves enough of them to allow compliance functions to make decisions they have been deferring for years.

The word permissionless has been doing a lot of work in DeFi. It carries a promise: that financial infrastructure can be built and accessed without gatekeepers, without identity verification, without the approval of a regulator or a bank. Smart contracts execute automatically. Code is law. The system does not care who you are.

Regulators have spent the past three years methodically dismantling this framing, and they are not wrong to do so.