Lettre ouverte d'avocats spécialisés en cryptomonnaies à Donald Trump : Comment faire des États-Unis la capitale mondiale de la cryptomonnaie ?
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Lettre ouverte d'avocats spécialisés en cryptomonnaies à Donald Trump : Comment faire des États-Unis la capitale mondiale de la cryptomonnaie ?
Les membres de l'Association des avocats spécialisés en droit des cryptomonnaies ont établi des mesures concrètes permettant au nouvel gouvernement Trump de créer un environnement optimal pour le développement des cryptomonnaies.
Dédié à des analyses Web3 approfondiesSource : CoinDesk
Traduction : Baishui, Jinse Finance
Preface
Over 20 lawyers working in the cryptocurrency industry have written an open letter outlining how the incoming Trump administration could create a legal environment favorable to crypto development. Exclusively published by CoinDesk, the letter covers regulation of the SEC and CFTC, potential legislation on stablecoins and DeFi, as well as tax reductions and procedural simplifications.
Below is the original text of the letter:
Dear President-elect Trump,
Last year, you delivered a keynote speech at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, promising that if re-elected, you would make America the global capital of cryptocurrency. As you return to the White House this Monday, we write to you as practicing members of the Association of Cryptocurrency Lawyers to recommend regulatory policies that will help you achieve this goal.
America, like cryptocurrency itself, is founded upon individual liberty and is thus naturally positioned to lead global progress. Unfortunately, U.S. regulators have so far refused to apply existing laws to digital assets and the blockchains behind them (or even explain why), creating an adverse business climate that has forced many entrepreneurs and developers overseas.
To unleash American ingenuity and redress regulatory neglect toward the blockchain industry, we recommend your administration advance forward-looking policies in three areas: supporting American companies; promoting core cryptographic values such as privacy, disintermediation, and decentralization; and fostering a healthy domestic business environment.
Supporting American Enterprises
The cryptocurrency industry has already produced a range of mature and emerging use cases—including digital gold, stablecoins, permissionless payments, decentralized finance (DeFi), real-world assets, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and more. Many of these are being responsibly advanced in the United States by firms like Coinbase, Circle, and Consensys, as well as developers contributing to open-source, decentralized crypto infrastructure. To remain competitive internationally, these actors require clear rules and appropriate regulatory guidance.
General Rules
Token issuance and secondary market trading—central activities in the crypto economy—are constrained by overlapping and confusing jurisdictions between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Market structure legislation should clearly delineate the primary regulator’s jurisdiction and specify when assets enter or exit its scope.
Congress must avoid replicating the SEC’s overly broad application of U.S. securities law. Tokens driven by open-source software and consensus mechanisms, with minimal reliance on centralized participants, are not securities, as there is no legal relationship between token holders and an “issuer” as defined under securities law. Likewise, crypto assets such as art NFTs (purely digital artwork) and non-investment activities (such as staking or lending bitcoin) fall outside the purview of securities regulation.
Congress should be bold. This means not being bound by prior legislative efforts such as FIT21, which emerged from earlier political contexts and produced unintended consequences. It also means learning from international regulatory experiences—such as the EU’s MiCA framework—while avoiding their pitfalls, charting a unique and fearless path forward for the United States.
Specific Sectors
Beyond advocating general principles, your administration should urge Congress and relevant agencies to address specific sectors due to their strategic importance to both the crypto industry and the nation.
Stablecoins. With a current market capitalization exceeding $200 billion, stablecoins are the lifeblood of the digital asset ecosystem. As frameworks like the Stablecoin Standard gain traction and national regulators increasingly recognize their role, comprehensive legislation is needed to govern their issuance and oversight—ensuring they are transparently backed and do not threaten financial stability. Beyond consumer benefits, regulatory support for stablecoins advances national interests. Like Eurodollars, dollar-denominated stablecoins reinforce the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency and increase demand for U.S. Treasuries held by issuers.
TradFi Integration. The unprecedented success of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs signals that crypto is beginning to integrate with traditional finance. Regulatory policy should ensure safe and orderly integration, giving consumers access to trusted custodial services. This requires revising or repealing biased SEC accounting rules (such as SAB 121) and custody regulations. But it shouldn’t stop there. Supportive innovation policy in this area should also promote the tokenization of traditional financial assets—such as stocks, bonds, or real estate—into blockchain-based tokens. The resulting benefits—greater liquidity, fractional ownership, and faster settlement—will strengthen U.S. capital markets and ensure they remain the most advanced and innovative in the world.
DeFi. Decentralized finance holds the potential to modernize the global financial system and deliver value to ordinary Americans by eliminating costly financial intermediaries. You should not allow entrenched interests and fearmongering to prevent the U.S. from becoming the world leader in DeFi. In this context, regulations targeting centralized actors such as exchanges and issuers must be crafted in a way that avoids inadvertently capturing and crippling the still-nascent DeFi ecosystem.
Promoting Innovation Through Commitment to Crypto Values
To foster crypto innovation, regulatory policy must respect core crypto values including privacy, disintermediation, and decentralization. This commitment yields two key regulatory principles: first, where traditional analogues exist, regulation should not impose greater burdens on crypto; second, regulation should evolve where no traditional analogue exists.
When Crypto Should Be Treated Equally to Traditional Assets and Instruments
The first principle applies to products such as self-custody wallets, which enable users to hold and manage their own private keys. Since these tools resemble physical wallets used for personal asset management, they should not be treated differently—for regulatory supervision or monitoring purposes—as financial intermediaries. Just as you need not complete KYC to deposit cash into a physical wallet, storing tokens in a digital wallet should be no different.
Similar logic applies to taxation of block rewards. Americans who mine or validate blockchain transactions are creating new property, much like farmers cultivating crops. Yet the IRS currently taxes their income at creation. This discriminatory treatment should be eliminated.
When Crypto Should Be Treated Differently
The second principle requires regulators to resist placing crypto participants and activities into legacy frameworks incompatible with crypto. Doing so undermines the crypto ecosystem, drives industry offshore, and erodes the rule of law.
Unfortunately, this is the path many U.S. regulators have chosen.
The IRS has begun treating crypto front-ends as “brokers” despite lacking statutory authority. The Department of Justice has started prosecuting non-custodial wallet developers under unlicensed money transmitting rules, despite longstanding policy to the contrary. The Treasury Department sanctioned the privacy-enhancing mixer Tornado Cash’s smart contract, even though it is neither a foreign person nor property—but merely code. (An appellate court later overturned this sanction.)
Without diminishing the importance of government interests—tax evasion, money laundering, and national security—we believe the government’s approach in each case is misguided from an innovation policy standpoint, and we encourage your administration to reverse these practices.
We urge regulators not to regulate digital assets and blockchain enterprises as they would traditional corporations, but instead to collaborate with this new technological paradigm and our industry. For example, if government monitoring (KYC) in decentralized environments is deemed necessary in certain cases, regulators could leverage cross-protocol, portable, blockchain-based credentials that allow users to control their data—a strength of Web3 architecture—and align with frictionless blockchain ecosystems. Similarly, they could harness the programmability of tokens and smart contracts to exclude sanctioned parties from the crypto economy.
Attracting Top Talent Through a Healthy Business Environment
To become the destination of choice for top crypto talent, the United States must cultivate a healthy business environment. Your administration can begin this process from day one.
End de-banking of crypto firms. Your administration should direct the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and all other agencies involved in Operation Chokepoint 2.0 to immediately cease irresponsible actions aimed at de-banking the crypto industry.
Improve SEC rulemaking and enforcement. You should instruct your SEC Chair to thoroughly reform the agency’s approach to crypto. Over the past four years, the SEC has overreached its authority—suing reputable industry leaders like Coinbase and Consensys, regulating individual developers and users (through redefined exchange listing rules), and bringing enforcement actions against wallet providers. It is now time for the SEC to correct these harmful practices, begin constructive engagement with the crypto industry, and focus its efforts on preventing fraud rather than stifling financial speculation—which is beneficial to innovation.
Eliminate punitive tax rules. Your administration should eliminate punitive tax rules that push entrepreneurs and developers overseas, while leaving well-intentioned taxpayers uncertain about how to calculate their tax liabilities. Low-hanging improvements include allowing current expensing for software development; deferring taxes on validator rewards and airdrops; establishing a safe harbor for de minimis transactions (e.g., below $5,000); offering mark-to-market election options for crypto investors; and repealing IRS reporting requirements that treat websites as brokers. Congress should also repeal amendments to Section 6050I, which impose burdensome (and potentially unconstitutional) reporting obligations on cryptocurrency transactions exceeding $10,000.
Reduce unnecessary red tape. Aligned with the mission of the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), we urge your office to work with Congress and federal agencies to reduce unnecessary red tape restricting cryptocurrency and fintech. This includes streamlining or eliminating registration and reporting requirements for digital asset offerings that meet certain conditions, including providing necessary investor disclosures. Congress should also consider enacting legislation to establish a uniform federal money transmission licensing framework, bringing clarity and efficiency to the broader fintech ecosystem.
In implementing the above forward-looking policies, we encourage your administration to consult with industry leaders and remain sensitive to the transnational nature of the digital asset ecosystem. (We view your establishment of a cryptocurrency council as a positive step in this direction.) We also recommend leveraging tools such as regulatory sandboxes to mitigate risks of unintended regulatory consequences.
Now is the time for America to assert its global regulatory leadership. By ensuring this happens, your administration will contribute to the nation’s future economic prosperity and support a technology rooted in America’s deeply held values of liberty and freedom. You should seize this moment.
Sincerely,
Ivo Entchev, Olta Andoni, Stephen Rutenberg, Donna Redel
The following members of the Association of Cryptocurrency Lawyers also signed this letter: Mike Bacina, Joe Carlasare, Eli Cohen, Mike Frisch, Jason Gottlieb, Eric Hess, Katherine Kirkpatrick, Dan McAvoy, John McCarthy, Margaret Rosenfeld, Gabriel Shapiro, Ben Snipes, Noah Spaulding, Andrea Tinianow, Jenny Vatrenko, Collin Woodward, and Rafael Yakobi.
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