President Joe Biden’s administration has just weeks left to go, but it could still make DeFi degens’ lives difficult.
There’s a chance Biden-era regulation targeting decentralised finance protocols will be finalised before president-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House, lobbyists say.
If approved, they risk dampening the euphoria that’s been unleashed across the cryptosphere since Trump won the US election last week.
Bitcoin has surged close to $90,000 this week — a sign that investors believe the president-elect, Senate and Congress will favour crypto.
What’s at risk
The two proposals — one from the Securities and Exchange Commission, and one from the US Treasury and tax authority — are unrelated.
But thematically, the bills do the same thing, DeFi Education Fund CEO Miller Whitehouse-Levine told DL News. They look to apply existing regulations to the sector, against its ethos of decentralisation.
“Both mandate centralisation where it doesn’t exist,” Whitehouse-Levine said.
SEC exchange rule
The SEC’s proposal looks to expand the definition of “exchange.”
The agency first proposed these amendments in 2022. The proposal originally didn’t mention crypto or DeFi, but was later updated to include information on them.
Why is that alarming for DeFi? Because it would force decentralised exchanges to register with the SEC, which is time-consuming, expensive, and runs counter to the ethos of decentralisation.
Republican SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has said the proposal would impose centralisation, choke innovation, and send businesses offshore.
It “sends a message that we are uninterested in facilitating innovation and competition in the financial markets and instead seek to protect incumbents,” she said.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler, on the other hand, has said: “Calling yourself a crypto platform is not an excuse to ignore the securities laws. Calling yourself a DeFi platform is not an excuse to defy the securities laws.”
The SEC has put the proposals through the legal notice and comment period, and “could finalise this at any time,” Whitehouse-Levine told DL News.
A source who has met with the SEC on the matter told DL News they were hopeful that the agency would not finalise the rule. That’s because the new Congress could use a mechanism called the Congressional Review Act to overturn rules finalised by federal agencies.
Under the act, lawmakers would have 60 days from the rule’s finalisation to overturn it, and the SEC would not be allowed to re-propose the rules in their current form.
Tax reporting rules
The US Treasury Department, and Internal Revenue Service want to recover an estimated $28 billion in unreported gains from US crypto investors.
To that end, they proposed rules that require businesses to give customers annual forms detailing every sale or exchange of their assets.
These rules were finalised in June, and were relatively uncontroversial, Whitehouse-Levine said, as they applied to centralised exchanges like Coinbase or Kraken.
These businesses already keep detailed records on their customers, and the rules help their users file their taxes.
However, another section of the proposal that has not been passed yet would affect DeFi protocols and projects like noncustodial wallets.
If passed, protocols, developers, and project backers must verify users’ identity and collect personal information on them in order to generate the required tax forms.
The Treasury did not finalise that part of the rules after the DeFi industry and investors flooded the Treasury Department with over 44,000 comments.
They said the rules risk undermining the purpose of blockchain technology to enable peer-to-peer transactions and cut out the middlemen tasked with verifying users’ identities and tracking their behaviour.
Crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly Digital Management said the rules “could destroy the very dream of DeFi,” and risk pushing DeFi innovators offshore, and make those who remain more centralised.
Despite the protests, the regulators may still steam ahead.
“The IRS has repeatedly signalled they intend to finalise that half of the rulemaking at some point this year,” Whitehouse-Levine said.
Joanna Wright is a Regulation Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at joanna@dlnews.com.