The decentralized
- Crypto has marked victories under Trump, but privacy remains a point of collision.
- A White House report suggested forcing the protocols to implement anti-whitening measures if the property of the tokens was concentrated among a handful of investors.
A version of this article appeared in our The decentralized Newsletter on August 12. Register here.
Donald Trump’s deregulatory blitz has his limits.
He does not seem to love financial life, an omission that seems to have developers of Crypto Galvanized and political experts.
To summarize: last week, the developer of Tornado Cash Roman Storm was found guilty of a federal crime. The previous week, the developers of Samurai Wallet pleaded guilty to the same crime.
The same day as the developers of Samurai threw in the towel, Trump’s Crypto Policy team published a 166 -page report entitled “Strengthening American leadership in digital financial technology”. Not everyone liked what they saw.
The report recommended extending the infamous Patriot Act to cover cryptographic technology, labeling certain tools “main concerns of money laundering”. He suggested forcing the protocols DEFI to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act and its anti-flowage arrangements.
“This could include services that have assets or have centralized governance, including in cases where governance tokens are held by a small group of people who can effectively assert control,” said the report.
There is a cost for privacy. As one of the Storm prosecutors said, “is not anonymity just another word to hide?”
The argument seemed to be that we all have something to hide, but that criminals have more to hide.
There is also a cost so as not to have intimacy. As one of Storm’s lawyers said, “How would you feel if someone took your bank account and published it on the Internet?”
The wisdom received from the Defi community is that finances based on blockchain will never be running without confidentiality.
Developers retaliate.
“For me, the medium-term objective is to make confidentiality (the) defect in portfolios,” said co-founder Ethereum Vitalik Buterin during a recent appearance on the Bankless podcast.
“The biggest error that we make as a ecosystem at the moment is that we have proposed this concept of confidentiality portfolio. We should not have confidentiality portfolios – intimacy should be a characteristic of portfolios.”
Buterin added that the Ethereum Foundation has started working on the issue, and more information can be expected in the coming months. He also promised an additional $ 500,000 for Storm’s legal costs.
Last week, the CEO of Electric Coin Company, Josh Swihart, asked senators to protect financial life in a future mega-factor.
“It is not a question of hiding the crime; it is a question of protecting the citizens respectful of the laws against constant surveillance, the violations of data and the unjust profiling,” wrote Swihart.
“Treating all digital life -oriented as suspects would be similar to the prohibition of locks because criminals could hide behind closed doors.”
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This week in governance deffruit
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Post of the week
Trump promised a strategic bitcoin reserve filled with crypto seized by the American police. According to a rumor, the first contribution will come from a cryptographic developer.
The irony of the Samurai Fund portfolio being the first official deposit in the SBR captures fairly well the current moment of Bitcoin / Crypto, IMO.
– Zack Shapiro (@zackbshapiro) August 10, 2025
Aleks Gilbert is the DL News DL News correspondent. Do you have a tip? Email to Aleks@dlnews.com.
