SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, known as 'Crypto Mom,' delivered a pivotal speech at the Science of Blockchain Conference on August 4, 2025, advocating for robust financial privacy protections in cryptocurrency. Peirce criticized the current financial system as a 'surveillance state,' citing that 324,000 institutions filed over 25 million transaction reports in 2024, including 4.7 million suspicious activity reports. She specifically condemned the 55-year-old Bank Secrecy Act for deputizing financial institutions as de facto law enforcement investigators.
Peirce championed privacy-enhancing technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, mixers, and privacy pools, while highlighting DeFi protocols as alternatives to discriminatory lending practices. She urged policies protecting self-custody rights, non-prosecution of open-source developers, and elimination of intermediary requirements in peer-to-peer transactions, stating: "We should not deputize citizens to surveil neighbors—a practice antithetical to a free society."
Concurrently, SEC Chair Paul Atkins unveiled Project Crypto, an initiative to modernize securities regulations for on-chain finance. Atkins committed to reviewing and potentially repealing outdated rules to support tokenized assets, declaring: "We'll ensure the next chapter of financial innovation is written in America." The White House is preparing an executive order to penalize banks that discriminate against crypto firms, reversing Biden-era policies.