Say Goodbye to This Rule

Plus, 🧾 SEC offers new crypto regs, 📣 Silk Road boss to speak, 🎈 Helium case dropped, 🗳️ Solana Policy Institute’s strategy, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 11, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 📜 DeFi broker rule defeated

  • 📘 SEC offers crypto guidance

  • 👤 Ross Ulbricht returns to public eye

  • 🔓 SEC drops Helium case

  • 🗳️ Solana lobby lays out battle plan

The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.

By Tikta and Veronica Irwin

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a joint Congressional resolution on Thursday to repeal a Biden-era IRS rule that would have required decentralized finance platforms to report user transactions to the Internal Revenue Service.

The overturned rule, finalized last December, aimed to classify DeFi protocols as "brokers" under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, obliging them to collect and report gross proceeds from crypto sales, alongside user information.

Republican Representative Mike Carey introduced the joint resolution to ditch the rule in January under the Congressional Review Act. It was then advanced by the House Ways and Means Committee in February, although all the Democrats on the committee were opposed to it.

Seventy-six Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the repeal when it was passed in the full House on March 11. 

The bill then headed to the Senate, which voted 70-28 to pass the resolution last month.

“This is the first cryptocurrency bill EVER signed into law by a president,” Carey wrote on X. 

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued guidance that clarifies how federal securities laws apply to crypto assets, focusing on disclosure requirements for entities issuing or handling tokens that may qualify as securities.

Crypto companies must detail revenue models, token functionality, and post-launch network management plans. They must also disclose blockchain consensus mechanisms, security protocols, and whether or not their projects are open source.

The guidance comes from the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance as a stop-gap effort until the newly established Crypto Task Force develops a more comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets.

“We're not saying your crypto assets are securities, but if they are (and we're working on clarifying that) or your company is involved in the crypto industry, here's some disclosure guidance,” said SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who heads up the Crypto Task Force.

Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace, on Thursday announced his first public appearance since his release from prison, saying he would appear at The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas in late May.

The event marks Ulbricht’s return to the public eye after he received a full presidential pardon from Donald Trump in an executive order the president signed on his second day in the Oval Office in January.

Ulbricht was serving a life sentence without parole for operating Silk Road, on which drugs, guns, and even murders-for-hire were traded using Bitcoin during its early years. His case became a flashpoint in debates about the role of crypto in unregulated markets.

Shortly after his release, Ulbricht posted a video on X saying he was grateful to “have [his] life back” after 11 years, adding, “there's a lot to talk about” when he re-engages with the community.

The SEC this week dismissed its lawsuit against Nova Labs, the developer of the decentralized wireless network Helium, marking the conclusion of yet another Gary Gensler-era lawsuit.

“With this dismissal, we can now definitively say that all compatible Helium Hotspots and the distribution of HNT, IOT, and MOBILE tokens through the Helium Network are not securities,” Helium said in a blog post.

The dismissal with prejudice prevents the SEC from pursuing similar charges against Helium for its 2019 token issuance.

The regulator has recently dropped cases against other major crypto firms including Coinbase, Kraken, Ripple, and Uniswap. 

Paul Atkins, the Trump-appointed SEC chair confirmed earlier this week, is expected to adopt a more crypto-friendly regulatory approach than Gensler, who took a tough line with the industry.

Under the Biden administration, SEC Chair Gary Gensler was crypto’s great unifier. 

Seen by the industry as an overzealous regulator, he encouraged American crypto firms to band together in a shared strategy: fight his agency’s enforcement actions in court, and lobby for the passage of bills that would restrain him from doing more damage.

“When everyone faces the choice of living or dying, everyone’s on the same page: they want to live,” said Miller Whitehouse-Levine, the newly-anointed CEO of the Solana Policy Institute.

But that is no longer the case, says Whitehouse-Levine, as crypto has gotten virtually everything it could have ever wanted at the last election. 

It now has a pro-crypto president, a Congress that is pushing through legislation with haste, and an SEC chairman in Paul Atkins, who once consulted for some of the very crypto firms he will be regulating.

Now, Solana wants a seat of its own at the table. So, what exactly does its new lobbying group plan to fight for?

  • 🪓 Sam Bankman-Fried was this week transferred to the high-risk Victorville Medium II prison in California, known for gang violence and racial segregation, after serving time in Brooklyn and Oklahoma facilities following his sentencing to 25 years for  fraud.

  • 🧾 Jack Dorsey’s Block this week agreed to a $40 million settlement with New York regulators over past compliance failures tied to its Cash App’s lax money-laundering safeguards, and will now operate under the oversight of an external monitor.

  • 🦹‍♂️ A maximal extractable value bot named “Yoink” exploited Wayfinder’s PROMPT airdrop on Kaito, stealing $200,000 in ETH from early claimers by front-running transactions, forcing TokenTable to pause the process and promise full user reimbursements.

  • 💥 Senate Democrats on Thursday slammed the Justice Department’s axing of its crypto enforcement team as a dangerous retreat from financial crime oversight, warning that the move could embolden terrorists and traffickers amid President Donald Trump’s deregulatory crypto pivot.

  • 🤝 Grayscale and Osprey Funds this week settled their two-year legal fight over bitcoin exchange-traded fund marketing practices, pausing litigation for 45 days to finalize terms after a February ruling dismissed Osprey’s claims of deceptive advertising.

  • 🏛️ North Carolina lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill to allow crypto for taxes and transactions, requiring digital assets to meet liquidity, market cap, and track record thresholds to qualify for state-level recognition.

  • 🧬 A startup offering bitcoin-based life insurance raised $40 million led by Framework and Fulgur Ventures, aiming to scale globally with BTC-denominated annuities that hedge against fiat devaluation.