Crypto In The Courts: Five Cases Reshaping Digital Asset Regulation In 2025

There has rarely been a larger or more widely distributed financial market that existed in a more uncertain regulatory context than cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance (DeFi) at the start of 2025. In the past several years, the regulatory status of this asset class in the United States has been at the center of a concerted effort by the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) to apply the regime applicable to securities to diverse crypto instruments and methods of exchange and transfer. (Although the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has also consistently enforced its regulations on products it deems to be commodities, that effort has not led to the widespread litigation that is likely to define the regulatory status of these products.)