CryptoLink Newsletter - June 2025

June marked a pivotal moment in U.S. digital asset oversight with major developments from the SEC, Congress, and the DOJ. First, on June 9, 2025, the SEC’s Crypto Task Force held its final scheduled roundtable called “DeFi and the American Spirit,” which brought together SEC staff, legal experts, and technological experts to discuss the Commission’s role in overseeing DeFi. During the roundtable, SEC leadership highlighted the alignment of DeFi’s principles with the core American values of economic liberty, private property rights and innovation. In parallel, the GENIUS Act (Guaranteeing Essential Nonbank Issuers Uniform Standards), bill focused on stablecoin regulation, passed the Senate on June 17, marking the first time a comprehensive federal framework for stablecoin regulation cleared a chamber of Congress. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has publicly remarked on the importance of the Genius Act for furthering the aim of “continuing to work to make America—already the world’s leader in financial market innovation—the center of crypto asset innovation as well.”

Next, the DOJ has continued to focus on intentional misconduct over technical violations in the digital asset space. This shift was exemplified by two major civil forfeiture actions in June: a $7.74 million seizure linked to North Korean IT operatives using crypto for sanctions evasion, and a record-breaking $225.3 million crypto forfeiture tied to large-scale crypto confidence scams, also known as “pig butchering,” where scammers cultivated fake relationships with victims to lure them into fake crypto investment platforms. Crypto confidence scams have proliferated in recent years. In 2024 alone, approximately $5.8 billion in losses from cryptocurrency investment fraud was reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. With the aim of deterring these scams, on June 18, the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint targeting $225.3 million in cryptocurrency—the largest cryptocurrency seizure in U.S. Secret Service history. The DOJ’s focus on civil forfeiture and crypto confidence scams is consistent with its intensified efforts to target criminal behavior in the digital asset space focused on fraud.