The Department of Justice will no longer prosecute cryptocurrency firms for “unwitting” regulatory violations and will instead focus on prosecuting those who victimize crypto investors and those who use digital assets to support other illicit activities.
The DOJ has also disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, effective immediately, and ordered its Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to cease crypto enforcement.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche inked a memo detailing such changes Monday.
“The Justice Department will no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets while President Trump's actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework,” wrote Blanche.
Prosecutors are directed to stop charging regulatory violations, including unlicensed money transmitting, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act, unregistered securities offering violations, unregistered broker-dealer violations, and other violations of registration requirements under the Commodity Exchange Act “unless there is evidence that the defendant knew of the licensing or registration requirement at issue and violated such a requirement willfully.”
The policy outlined in Executive Order 14178, according to Blanche, requires the DOJ to prioritize investigations that include “embezzlement and misappropriation of customers' funds on exchanges, digital asset investment scams, fake digital asset development projects such as rug pulls, hacking of exchanges and decentralized autonomous organizations resulting in the theft of funds, and exploiting vulnerabilities in smart contracts.”
Such focuses are intended to restore stolen customer funds and build investor confidence in digital assets, Blanche wrote.
Ongoing investigations that don’t connect into illicit activities such as organized crime, human trafficking, drug smuggling and terrorism, or take advantage of investors, should be closed, Blanche wrote.
The memo is in line with a slew of crypto regulatory developments under President Donald Trump, including rule easings at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped several ongoing cases against crypto firms and has alsodeveloped a crypto task force.
Trump also announced the creation of, and named the coins within, a national crypto reserve.
These developments align with promises Trump made along the campaign trail while courting the crypto vote. During his campaign to be the 47th president, he raised millions from crypto firms and professionals who saw him as, as Kraken founder Jesse Powell described him, “the only pro-crypto majority party candidate.” Powell shelled out $1 million for Trump.
Six years ago, the president was a vocal crypto skeptic.
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” Trump posted on the social media site previously known as Twitter.
Now, though, he appears to be all in. Beyond tapping crypto-friendly regulators and writing multiple digital asset-related executive orders, he joined the industry by launching World Liberty Financial, a crypto firm, with his sons in September.
He and his wife Melania also each launched their own meme coins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, days before inauguration day. $TRUMP is currently worth $8.16, down from its all-time high of $73.43; and $MELANIA is now worth $0.53, down from its all-time high of $13.73, according to CoinMarketCap.
