Crypto Regulation · Retrospective
When we wrote our 2022 overview of global cryptocurrency regulation, the central challenge for regulators everywhere was the same: how to build a coherent legal framework for a technology that didn't fit neatly into any existing financial category. The industry was growing at breakneck speed — DeFi TVL had peaked near $180 billion, NFT volumes were in the tens of billions, and major institutions from JPMorgan to Fidelity were quietly building digital asset infrastructure. The regulatory question wasn't whether to regulate, but how.
Four years later, the answers are in. Not all of them, and not all consistent — but the global regulatory map has been drawn with far more specificity than any 2022 observer could have anticipated. The FTX collapse was the catalytic event that compressed a decade of regulatory deliberation into 18 months. What follows is an assessment of where we called it right, where we undercalled the pace of change, and where the truly significant surprises emerged.
In 2022, we highlighted the EU's Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation as "a comprehensive framework creating legal certainty." This proved to be the most accurate prediction in the entire piece. MiCA was fully enacted in December 2024, requiring all crypto asset service providers (CASPs) operating in the EU to obtain authorization, maintain capital reserves, publish white papers, and comply with AML/CFT obligations — regardless of where they are headquartered.
The significance of MiCA extends well beyond the EU's borders. It has effectively become the global compliance baseline: companies building for the EU market must comply with MiCA, and that compliance infrastructure is more stringent than most other jurisdictions. Coinbase obtained its MiCA license in 2024 and restructured its European operations accordingly. Circle, issuer of USDC, became the first stablecoin issuer to achieve MiCA compliance — a critical competitive advantage as the EU's electronic money token (EMT) framework requires backing reserves and redemption guarantees that non-compliant stablecoins like USDT cannot easily provide. Tether's potential EU exclusion under MiCA remains one of the most-watched regulatory developments of 2025–2026.
Post-Brexit, the UK has pursued a separate path — positioning itself as a "crypto hub" while maintaining rigorous standards. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has approved only a fraction of crypto firm applications, maintaining high bars for AML compliance. The UK's Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 brought crypto into the mainstream financial regulatory framework, and the government's 2024 consultation on stablecoins and staking signals continued legislative development.
Our 2022 assessment of Asia was prescient on both ends of the spectrum. China's prohibition has remained absolute — and its CBDC, the digital yuan (e-CNY), has been expanded to over 200 million wallets while the government continues to prohibit private cryptocurrency trading. The contradiction between a state-controlled digital currency and a ban on decentralized alternatives is by design: China wants the efficiency of digital money without the disintermediation of state financial control.
Dubai has been the single biggest regulatory surprise of the past four years. We mentioned it briefly as an "emerging hub" in 2022; by 2026, the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) has issued licenses to over 600 virtual asset businesses including Binance (which relocated substantial operations there post-U.S. legal challenges), Bybit, OKX, and dozens of Web3 companies. Dubai has effectively become what Singapore was in 2021 — but with more aggressive business incentives and a less restrictive approach to retail access.
The 2022 piece correctly identified the U.S. regulatory environment as "characterized by fragmentation and inter-agency conflict." What we underestimated was how dramatically that would shift — first toward aggressive enforcement and then, following the 2024 election, toward comprehensive legislative reform.
The FIT21 Digital Commodity Exchange Act, which passed the House in May 2024 and is advancing through the Senate under the new administration, would finally resolve the SEC/CFTC jurisdictional conflict by classifying most digital assets with decentralized networks as commodities under CFTC jurisdiction, while keeping securities-like tokens (those with centralized issuers maintaining control) under SEC oversight. This is essentially the framework Ripple's legal team argued for throughout the SEC litigation — and it is now becoming federal law.
The CFTC under the Trump administration has become the de facto primary regulator for the crypto spot market, a role it was never designed to play at this scale. The agency's budget and staff have expanded significantly to handle the workload, with Chairman Brian Quintenz championing a "light-touch" regulatory approach that prioritizes self-certification over prior approval.
In 2022, we didn't dedicate sufficient attention to stablecoins as a distinct regulatory category. This was an analytical gap — by 2026, stablecoin regulation has become arguably the most consequential frontier in global financial regulation. Tether (USDT) now represents over $140 billion in circulation; Circle's USDC maintains $50 billion+. These are not trivial sums — USDT's market cap now exceeds the GDP of many countries.
The U.S. GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins), advancing through Congress in 2025–2026, would require stablecoin issuers to hold 1:1 reserves in U.S. Treasuries or insured deposits, register with federal banking regulators, and comply with AML requirements. This effectively creates a new category of regulated financial institution — the "payment stablecoin issuer" — and could transform Circle, Paxos, and similar companies into something more like chartered banks than fintech startups.
The global regulatory picture has clarified substantially since 2022, and with clarity comes opportunity. MiCA compliance infrastructure — custody, white paper preparation, AML integration — is now a genuine B2B market. Companies like Chainalysis, Elliptic, and Merkle Science are the compliance infrastructure picks-and-shovels plays of the global regulatory buildout. Regulated exchanges — Coinbase in the U.S., Kraken in Europe, and OSL in Hong Kong — have durable competitive advantages over unregulated competitors that no longer have regulatory arbitrage to exploit. The era of "move fast and break regulations" in crypto is over. The winners in the next cycle will be the companies that moved deliberately and built compliant.