Legal Expert: Treasury Department Plans To “Capture DeFi”

General counsel to Compound Labs, Jake Chervinsky, has warned that the Treasury Department wants to “capture” the DeFi sector through the crypto provisions added to the infrastructure bill. The last-minute cryptocurrency provisions added to the U.S. infrastructure bill sought to “capture DeFi,” argues Compound’s general counsel Jake Chervinsky.Appearing on the Bankless State of the Network podcast on August 17, Chervinsky — who is also DeFi Chair of the Blockchain Association — said the industry had been “blindsided” by the infrastructure bill’s crypto tax provisions which were announced....

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued its first-ever sanctions on a crypto mixer. The mixing service was used by Lazarus Group to process illicit proceeds from the $620 million crypto heist of the online game Axie Infinity, said the Treasury Department. Treasury Department Sanctions Crypto Mixer The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced Friday that it has sanctioned crypto mixer Blender.io (Blender). According to the OFAC, this mixing service is used by the Democratic....

The U.S. Treasury affirmed that crypto miners and wallet operators are exempt from the IRS reporting rules, preparing appropriate regulations. The cryptocurrency industry in the United States is about to score a major legal win as the U.S. Treasury Department plans to spare crypto miners, and other "ancillary parties" from tax reporting rules.In a letter to a group of senators on Friday, the U.S. Treasury indicated that it plans to exempt crypto miners, stakers and other market participants from rules that would require crypto brokers to share data on their clients’ transactions with the....

Tentative clampdowns coming from both the Treasury and the House in the United States lead this week's Law Decoded. Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's noteFor several weeks, rumors have circulated in the United States that the Treasury Department under Steven Mnuchin is planning some sort of rulemaking to ban or severely restrict self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets.The Treasury hasn’t made any public statements to support these rumors, but they are persistent and pervasive enough to be worth paying....

The U.S. Department of the Treasury does not see that cryptocurrency could be used in a large-scale way to evade sanctions. “Its share as a medium for illicit finance is not anywhere as large as just using cash,” a senior Treasury official noted. Treasury Department’s View on Crypto Use to Evade Sanctions Nellie Liang, Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, talked about the potential use of cryptocurrency as a tool to evade sanctions for Russia Friday in an interview with Reuters. The senior Treasury official explained that the crypto....