Blockchain Association Policy Summit 2025, Washington, DC: When Jake Chervinsky, Chief Legal Officer at Variant, opened the panel “Rulemaking and the Road Ahead,” he set the tone with characteristic candor. “A year ago,” he said, “we were talking about agencies trying to destroy this industry under the guise of regulation. Today, we’re talking about constructive rulemaking.”

The shift in tone reflected the changing dynamic between the digital assets sector and Washington regulators. The past year has seen an inflection point, one where the industry is not just defending itself from regulatory overreach but actively shaping the frameworks that will govern it for the next decade.

Joining Chervinsky were three prominent voices in crypto policy and law: Amanda Tuminelli, Executive Director of the DeFi Education Fund; Jason Gottlieb, Partner and Head of Digital Assets at Morrison Cohen; and Judd Littleton, Partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. Together, they explored how rulemaking, once a defensive battleground, has become the industry’s most strategic opportunity.

From Defense to Design

Littleton, an administrative law expert, traced the journey from litigation to collaboration. “A year ago, I was focused on fighting nonsensical rules like the SEC’s dealer-registration proposal,” he recalled. “Now, we’re working with an administration that’s at least open to granting regulatory relief. That changes everything.”

But change also brings complexity. As Littleton explained, it’s easier to fight bad rules than to draft good ones. “When you’re opposing everything Gary Gensler comes up with, that’s easy,” he quipped. “But crafting well-calibrated, defensible rules, that’s harder. Because once the rule is your rule, you’re the one who might face litigation.”

His point was sobering: rulemaking is not a one-way street. Every exemption, safe harbor, or interpretive guidance granted to crypto builders could trigger lawsuits from incumbent financial interests or activist groups on the other side. The industry, in other words, must now learn to play both offense and defense simultaneously.

Inside the Agencies: A Shift in Tone

Jason Gottlieb, one of the most recognizable attorneys in the crypto legal world, described the cultural shift more vividly. “For eight years, going to the SEC meant being yelled at in a windowless conference room on the second floor,” he said, drawing laughter from the room. “Now, you go to the tenth floor, talk to two commissioners, and they actually listen.”

That anecdote captured the new atmosphere emerging within Washington’s financial regulators. It doesn’t mean the road is clear, but the conversation is at least bilateral. Gottlieb emphasized that success now depends on strategic engagement. “You can’t just deal with one part of a regulator,” he said. “The SEC, the Treasury, the OCC, they all have internal divisions. You have to understand which office holds the keys to your specific issue.”

He also warned that constructive engagement does not mean complacency. Even within a friendlier environment, rulemaking requires “pushing, constantly pushing, to make sure they can get comfortable with innovation.”

From a technologist’s standpoint, this is critical advice. What Gottlieb described mirrors the iterative process of building open-source systems: consensus doesn’t happen by waiting; it happens through continuous contribution and patient debugging.

DeFi and the SEC: Building Safe Harbors

Amanda Tuminelli brought the conversation down to substance. As the head of the DeFi Education Fund, she’s been on the front lines designing proposals for the SEC’s digital assets framework. “We’ve submitted two key proposals,” she explained, “a Token Safe Harbor and a Broker Safe Harbor.”

The Token Safe Harbor would allow projects to issue tokens while decentralizing, providing disclosures and engaging with the SEC without being forced into full securities compliance prematurely. The Broker Safe Harbor would similarly shield builders who facilitate digital-asset interactions without engaging in traditional brokerage activities, such as collecting transaction-based compensation.

Both proposals aim to align regulatory expectations with technological reality. Tuminelli’s argument boiled down to a principle technologists readily understand: different functions require different protocols. Forcing decentralized applications into the mold of centralized financial intermediaries makes as little sense as running a blockchain node through a traditional bank switchboard.

Her prediction? “We’ll see the SEC issue guidance soon, maybe even rulemaking, around when a token sale constitutes a securities offering and when it does not.”

That would mark a breakthrough moment for the sector: an acknowledgment that decentralization is not a loophole, but a legitimate architecture deserving of fit-for-purpose regulation.

CFTC and the Expanding Scope of Oversight

Turning from securities to derivatives, Littleton forecast potential moves by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), especially as a new chair prepares to take office. The areas to watch, he said, include prediction markets, perpetual futures contracts, and 24/7 trading mechanisms,  innovations that challenge the CFTC’s traditional tools.

“The CFTC has actually been regulating event contracts for decades,” Littleton noted, “but now they’re under pressure to assert their authority more clearly,  or risk the courts letting the states call those products gambling.”

He also pointed to the need for joint guidance between the SEC and CFTC on issues like foreign exchange, cross-border trading, and decentralized derivatives protocols. Collaboration, not turf wars, will define the success of this regulatory generation.

These details might sound arcane, but technologists in the audience recognized their importance. A clear framework for derivatives and prediction markets could unlock entirely new categories of on-chain financial innovation, ones that automate compliance while preserving transparency.

Stablecoins: The Next Regulatory Battlefield

For Gottlieb, the next flashpoint lies with the stablecoin provisions of the Genius Act, passed earlier this year. “That’s mandated rulemaking,” he reminded attendees. “The Treasury and OCC must publish regulations by early 2027.”

The challenge, he explained, will be defining who counts as a “digital asset service provider” and what constitutes an unpermitted stablecoin. Section 411 of the Act, governing yield, rewards, and third-party issuers, leaves major interpretive gaps. “These are the battles being shaped right now,” Gottlieb said. “Do DeFi protocols count as issuers? What happens when software interfaces with liquidity providers? The text doesn’t resolve it, and that means the rulemaking will.”

Here again, the intersection of law and code becomes vivid. Regulators are being asked to define categories in systems that are programmable, composable, and borderless. The answer will determine whether the U.S. remains a hub for stablecoin innovation, or whether that innovation migrates offshore.

Preparing for Litigation 2.0

As Chervinsky noted, the industry’s newfound optimism comes with a dose of realism: every rule created now will likely be litigated later. “We used to sue the SEC; next time, we might be defending their rules,” he said wryly.

Tuminelli agreed, “We could find ourselves filing amicus briefs for the SEC,” she said, and pointed to early signals of pushback from traditional finance and policy groups already “staking out aggressive positions” in public comments.

That, according to the panel, underscores the importance of building a robust administrative record, detailed, credible documentation of how decentralized systems operate. “If someone claims a wallet interface is a broker,” Gottlieb said, “we need to show exactly how it works, that there’s no custody, no discretionary control.”

In other words, the technology itself is evidence. For regulators and courts, open-source transparency could become the industry’s strongest legal defense.

Speed Matters: The Race to Lock in Rules

Littleton made a tactical point that resonated through the room: timing is everything. He urged the industry and friendly regulators to finalize crypto rules before political winds shift again. “A new administration might not defend these rules,” he warned. “It’s better to face litigation now, with allies in government, than later, when the government is on the other side.”

Chervinsky closed the conversation with a final note of urgency. “One year from now,” he said, “I hope some of these rules are in place, and that we’re fighting over refinements instead of survival.”

The Technologist’s Takeaway

For technologists, this session underscored a simple truth: regulation, like protocol design, is modular, iterative, and fragile. The same way poorly written code can expose a system to exploits, poorly drafted laws can expose innovators to risk. But in both domains, open collaboration leads to stability.

The crypto industry’s evolution from resistance to participation mirrors the broader ethos of Web3, decentralized coordination in pursuit of shared public goods. The “road ahead” in rulemaking is messy, but it’s progress all the same. The builders who understand governance, both algorithmic and regulatory, will shape the infrastructure of finance for decades to come.

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