The future of cryptocurrency In the United States, there remains a subject of intense debate. Professor of finance Marco Di Maggio, who teaches the Imperial College in London and was previously an associate professor of Ogunlesi business administration and director of the Fintech, Crypto and Web3 Lab, director of the Harvard Business School, believes that the cryptographic industry is at the crossroads. The regulatory decisions made in the months and years to come and shape to what extent cryptocurrencies influence the American economy.
“Over the next two years, we will see more and more integration between traditional financial markets and blockchain underlying technology, including more than simple cryptocurrencies,” explains Di Maggio. (Blockchains or Digital Ledger Technologies (DLT) are used to record and verify transactions, including anonymous transactions, on a network of computers. Blockchain registers are highly secure public books, and data on a blockchain are permanent and theoretically unalterable. In practice, each transaction associated with a particular DLT is in the network A, valiant, and then added for a particular DLT.
Blockchain applications go beyond digital currencies such as crypto that store value and can be exchanged. Ethereum (ETH), a programmable and “altcoin” blockchain (any distinct cryptocurrency of bitcoin or BTC) allows innovations such as intelligent contracts, decentralized financing (DEFI) and non-buttons (NFTS). “Even the traditional financial markets, which have been conservative in the past,” says Di Maggio, “adopt blockchain technology”. Large institutions like Blackrock already incorporate blockchain into their operations, including to token real assets such as cash and cash bills on blockchain platforms, and by creating and managing negotiated funds in exchange (ETF) which invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, allowing institutional investors to access the Crypto market Funds.
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However, this rapid growth has created challenges, including security problems and market manipulation. The cryptography industry has experienced significant crises, such as the Sam Bankman FTX scam in 2022, in which billions of dollars have been frauds from customers. The great holders of crypto, called “whales”, have the power to considerably influence prices, potentially harming more recent and smaller investors. Lack of regulation and anonymity potential create continuous possibilities of fraud and initiate offense.
Government intervention
Di Maggio calls the current system In the United States, “application -based regulations” – in other words, regulators impose fines without offering a feasible path of conformity. This also allows some players to benefit while others fall through the meshes of the net and leads to enormous uncertainty. “One day, the president of the dry”, explains Di Maggio, “could wake up and say:” What I thought was legal until yesterday, today is no longer “.” This is exactly what started to happen in February 2025.
The administration under former President Joe Biden had previously acted within the framework of the “regulation based on the application of the law of DI Maggio, largely directed by the former president of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler. In May 2024, Biden also opposed his veto to a bipartite attempt to retreat the requirement of the dry that companies holding a cryptocurrency for customers lists those active as passive– mark them according to potential risks – on their financial statements. Biden argued that it was a necessary precaution because the cryptographic markets are very volatile, with prices often fired by everything, from macroeconomic trends to social media threw. Although “volatility is part of the DNA in this industry because it is so early,” said Di Maggio, regulatory clarity should reduce part of this volatility. However, only a few days after his second term, the administration of President Donald J. Trump quickly reversed the rule, opening the door to a dramatic change in the regulation of digital assets.
Indeed, President Trump, who has already described the bitcoin “scam against the dollar”, ran on a pro-Crypto position for the 2024 elections and called the United States as “capital of the cryptographic world”. In January 2025, Trump signed a decree entitled “strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology”, emphasizing “the importance of digital assets in American innovation and economic development”. This order was also promised to “provide regulatory clarity and certainty based on neutral regulations, executives that take into account emerging technologies, transparent decision -making and well -defined regulatory regulatory limits.”
“The first day, I’m going to turn Gary Gensler,” Trump said in a fiery address at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, last summer. Gensler was a public enemy n ° 1 according to many from the cryptography industry. From 2023, he launched a series of legal battles against the main crypto exchange platforms, including Coinbase, the largest exchange in the United States. These combinations were based on the classification of cryptocurrencies as titles negotiable on the financial markets.
Unlike traditional markets for stocks and obligations to Wall Street, where exchanges, brokers and guards have separate roles, crypto exchanges combine the roles of purchase, sale and security. However, existing American laws prohibit exchanges from performing the three functions; This means that there is no clear way that cryptocurrencies are classified as titles and legally negotiated as the exchanges currently work. Because digital currencies sold on Coinbase and several other platforms have been deemed unregistered securities, they were deemed illegal, exposing investors to a high risk of financial damage. Gensler used the case of the 1946 Supreme Court of Dry c. Howey Co., Who gave birth to the Howey test, to argue these cases. “If you want (crypto) to be security,” says Di Maggio, “you should have a framework that allows the operator to officially ask (an active) to be considered as a guarantee”, then allow these titles to be exchanged on approved platforms.
In a complete reversal of this precedent, on February 21, the SEC determined that he was going to abandon his trial against Coinbase, and the senior executives of Crypto Gemini, Opensea and Uniswap Labs companies announced stops in their business inquiries. This was led by the new President of the SEC, Mark T. Uyeda, who took his position in January and launched a “crypto working group” shortly after his appointment, designed to create a “complete and clear regulatory framework for cryptographic assets”, in particular the evaluation of the status of cryptocurrencies by virtue of securities. (Trump has received millions of platform campaign funding such as Coinbase.)
With a second potentially historical decision for the future future of the regulation of cryptography, the SEC declared on February 27 that coins – which it defined as “inspired by memes, characters, current events or trends for which the promoter seeks to attract an enthusiastic online community. He did it using the same case in the 1946 Supreme Court that Gensler used for the opposite interpretation. Trump’s family is now operating a crypto business that sells coins: $ Trump, which has started to circulate pre-anacute, and has resulted in losses of 2 billion dollars combined for 810,000 retail investors while Trump prices were swallowed extremely unpredictable throughout the electoral cycle.
An American strategic reserve for cryptocurrency
Trump campaign platform The discussions included on a “20 billion dollars’ bitcoin reserve” distinct from the potential inclusion of digital assets in the newly planned sovereign heritage fund. On March 2, Trump announced on his social media platform Truth Social that the strategic American cryptography reserve would include XRP, Solana (Sol), Cardano (ADA) and Ethereum (ETH) – All Altcoins – Bitcoin de l’AlongSide (BTC). Critics argue that the inclusion of altcoins, which are more volatile than Bitcoin, can induce investors misleading and divert attention from the established role of Bitcoin as a reserve of value, which positioned the cryptocurrency as a potential successor of gold. The CEO of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, notes that the lower Bitcoin volatility makes it the safest choice for a national reserve. On the other hand, the supporters, including the CEO of Ripple Brad Garlinghouse, argue that “crypto maximalism” – the belief that bitcoin should dominate all other altcoins – could limit the progress of industry and that the diversification of assets would align better with the objectives of the reserve.
The initiative for a strategic reserve of American cryptography marks a turning point in American policy towards cryptocurrency, potentially used as a cover against inflation and instability while strengthening American domination in digital assets. This could also stimulate industry growth and innovation, although investors and businesses will need clearer trade regulations, as Di Maggio argues. Unlike the broader deregulating approach of Trump of cryptocurrency combinations, this thrust for the integration of digital assets supported by the Government reports an evolution towards structured regulations, in particular for American financial security. The next White House cryptography summit on March 7 will probably put more details for the next blockchain chapter in the United States.
Crypto -specific financial regulations
Existing federal financial regulations, such as the Securities Act of 1933 and the EXCHAGE ACT SECURITIES of 1934, were manufactured for a very different financial landscape – as well as their application and their interpretation variable by the dry chairs Gensler and Uyeda to determine cryptographic assets as titles. Not only do they fail to meet the challenges posed by emerging industries such as crypto, but they can obviously be applied with different results for different political objectives. “We need a new set of rules for an industry that did not exist 100 years ago,” explains Di Maggio, who maintains that a clear and predictable regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies would be a “pro-business position”, not an anti-enterprise: it would guarantee that there is less variability in the determinations on a case-by-case basis of the assets and would protect investors.
