Will Crypto Values Survive the Regulatory Wave?

It is often said that crypto is part technology and part religion. As such, it is hardly surprising that the unfolding regulatory overhaul has been accompanied both by vigorous soul searching related to the state of crypto’s (often anti-establishment) core values and palpable excitement over potential new use cases.

With the blessing of CoinDesk, I asked the panelists of our upcoming people’s regulatory roundtable at Consensus 2025—each of them crypto veterans and advocates for sensible regulation—about safeguarding crypto values in regulatory reform and about the innovation that new regulation is making possible.

You can catch Kayvan Sadeghi, Connor Spelliscy, Lewis Cohen, Michelle Ann Gitlitz and David Adlerstein speaking at the People’s Regulatory Roundtable on May 14 at 10 a.m. on the Spotlight Stage. The roundtable will be moderated by Ivo Entchev. If you would like to submit a question ahead of time, please email it to opinion@coindesk.com.

This is what they had to say.

Which core crypto values are most important to you and why? How can we ensure that they are respected by regulatory reform?

KAYVAN: Individual freedom and sovereignty are core values. Privacy and decentralization are important largely as a means to achieving that sovereignty, which can otherwise be undermined through surveillance and centralized points of control.

To ensure that these values are respected, it is helpful to reframe the conversation to focus on the ways in which new technology can achieve the objectives of the existing laws, not just differently, but better. For example, many financial regulations are designed to prevent abuse by those with control over other people’s assets. But as long as humans hold that power, the risk of corruption and greed will persist and the same problems will recur.

Heavily regulated intermediaries is one path, but removing the human intermediaries altogether can eliminate the root cause. By analogy, one can curtail drunk-driving with stricter alcohol laws and more frequent roadside checkpoints, but those are band-aids on a problem that can be eliminated with autonomous vehicles.

There will be growing pains as new technology is battle-tested, and the risks will look different from the risks of human intermediaries, but the values can be preserved by focusing the discussion around the use of technology to deliver better solutions to problems that the law is already trying to solve.

CONNOR: Blockchain technology can provide users with unprecedented levels of transparency, reliability, and security—as long as policy frameworks allow it to flourish by incentivizing decentralization.

If properly regulated, blockchain projects will continue to decentralize, giving users greater control over their finances and digital assets, reducing reliance on overreaching institutions. Beyond financial use cases, decentralized blockchain networks function as infrastructure for a variety of applications that provide users with more autonomy over their lives, including, for example: social media platforms that allow users to own and control their data, community-owned platforms that leverage decentralized governance to compete with Big Tech, and digital identity protocols necessary for users to protect their identity online from sophisticated AI-enabled bots.

We believe that focusing on control is the most effective framing option for defining decentralization under law. Meeting a test for control would significantly reduce information asymmetries stemming from the control of a blockchain’s token, justifying lower regulatory burdens or exemptions under securities laws. We recommended specific control principles to implement in our Designing Blockchain for a Flourishing Industry paper we published this week, incorporating feedback from 40+ teams, founders, operators, lawyers, and policymakers.

LEWIS: When we talk about core values, I think about the values of those users and builders who are attracted to the crypto space, rather than the values of a technology as such. These individuals, in my experience, are attracted by many things that certainly include personal sovereignty and decentralization, but are by no means limited to these features.

What means the most to me and has driven me forward for the last 10 years, is working with, and serving the needs of, that incredibly diverse community of users and builders - fiercely dedicated to innovation and developing a new “Internet of Value.” We can never forget that, at its heart, “crypto” is a system of tools built from the ground up, not by large corporations, but by individuals contributing their time, energy, and creativity to help make the world a more connected and inclusive place.

MICHELLE: Decentralization is the most important value to me because the distribution of power, control, and decision-making across a network rather than in the hands of central authorities enables true digital ownership and freedom to transact. Where there is centralization and control, we need legal and regulatory safeguards that are reasonably tailored to the particular intricacies of the blockchain-based systems. Ensuring decentralization is respected requires legislators and regulators to truly understand the underlying infrastructure so they can craft rules that protect consumers from loss of funds or value and to safeguard against financial crimes.

DAVID: I’ve been a corporate lawyer for over 20 years and am an ardent believer in free markets. The concept of recognized rights in alienable property, the concept that entrepreneurs should be free to test ideas in the marketplace, and the concept of “freedom of contract”—that consenting adults should be free to enter into exchanges of goods and services as they desire—are all at the heart of U.S. corporate law (and that of other liberal democracies). These concepts are quintessential crypto values.

For all crypto’s novelty, the paradigm of needing reasonable regulatory safeguards around a new technology is an old one. Commercial airplanes were once new tech, and for good reason we have regulations to ensure things like pilot training and safety standards, but these days you can pretty much fly anywhere whenever you want to.

The same paradigm should apply here. I believe it is possible for regulators to preserve openness to new software-based business models and organizational forms, while reasonably tailoring safeguards to prevent things like financial crises and terror financing.

Is regulation opening the door to new and valuable business models/products?

KAYVAN: Sensible regulation could have profound implications for any business driven by community engagement and network effects. Many technologies are lowering the barrier for individuals and small teams to generate and distribute content in competition with larger centralized companies. Effective regulation can further empower individuals by paving the way for good actors to have more direct access to allocation of capital, and for a broader mainstream audience to participate in the ecosystem and benefit from the network effects of the communities in which they participate.

CONNOR: To be determined! We’ve seen a lot more mainstream and institutional interest in blockchain technology now that it appears the space will have clearer parameters as laid out in legislation like a market structure and stablecoin bill but until those bills pass, I think many ambitious and exciting blockchain projects will continue to have a problem scaling. I’m optimistic we’ll be seeing more impactful projects launch in areas like decentralized AI, digital identity, and social media. I’d also love to see legal clarity for novel organizational structures like DAOs so that those types of organizations can continue to experiment and improve; with respect to DAOs, the newly available Wyoming DUNA has proven to be a great step forward.

LEWIS: The door is always open to innovation! Regulation, when it works as it should, facilitates innovation in a balanced and sustainable manner, but is reactive to new business models that the community adopts and actually uses.

I think of regulations in their most ideal form as similar to the development of car travel. Innovators developed the automobile—“horseless carriages” which initially traveled along muddy trails intended for a very different kind of transportation. Seeing this innovation, the government paved and painted lines on roads. Yes, this constrained drivers to some extent, but it also allowed them to travel more safely and go much faster. It was the private sector that took the lead when it came to automobile innovation, designing new kinds of cars with new technologies that travel on those roads.

No matter how well intended at the time, any regulation that seeks to put its finger on the scale and promote one type of technology approach over another usually winds up backfiring in some way and distorting the market. Innovators will continue to create, and regulators should continue to watch over and adapt to these innovations, not lead them.

MICHELLE: I’ve been in the crypto industry for the last 10 years and have worked mostly in heavily regulated areas dealing with financial integrity and consumer protection. I’ve seen new business models and products such as stablecoins proliferate in the ecosystem in the absence of regulatory clarity. Thoughtful regulation enables wider adoption of innovative crypto products with greater confidence by providing clarity to developers and trust amongst users. I’ve also seen more projects in the crypto industry prioritize compliance compared to a decade ago.

As a result, there is a significant opportunity for RegTech solutions to build compliance tooling and processes. We do this every day at Change Agents where we are on a mission to streamline workflows, reduce costs and unlock efficiencies using our secure AI-powered automation first platform. Traditional financial institutions often operate on decades-old platforms that were not designed to interface with modern technologies. They struggle with fragmented data stored in disparate systems and formats. Jurisdictions maintain varying approaches to regulation, further complicating these issues.

Crypto platforms inherently facilitate compliance because blockchain technology enables transparent recordkeeping, more automated compliance checks and immutable audit trails. Crypto platforms are also developed with API-first approaches, making integration with RegTech products significantly more straightforward. Finally, crypto companies can oftentimes automate regulatory compliance functions directly from their transaction data rather than manually aggregating data from multiple systems, increasing delays and creating the potential for error. Ultimately, these factors give crypto companies a competitive edge over TradFi because they can better reduce compliance costs while also providing more accurate information to regulators.

DAVID: There are many powerful narratives within crypto, beginning with Bitcoin as a resilient store of value now over 16 years old borderline ancient for technology these days. But I’m particularly excited about stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets. The potential impact of having a nexus between capital and a fully composable, Turing-complete global computer is not widely understood.

Money is the very lifeblood of commerce, and things like instantaneous payments with little friction and the ability of the unbanked to use digital dollar equivalents, to name just a couple of examples, are only the beginning. Stablecoins are already fairly popular, but impending U.S. regulation will open the door to much more widespread usage. It’s critical to get stablecoin regulation right, with a particular emphasis on minimizing run risk, preserving the ability to combat illicit finance, and promoting interoperability.