The cryptocurrency industry is turning over a new leaf in the New Year. And this new leaf comes with new laws.
As of Jan. 1, 2026, Americans should have the right to crypto ATM refunds in Colorado; while in New York, the digital assets-focused Article 12 and other 2022 Amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) will have been signed into law. Nationally in the U.S., the Federal Reserve Board used the last weeks of 2025 to rescind several banking policy statements on “novel activities” relating to blockchain and digital assets.
And around the world, PYMNTS covered how a Jan. 1 report reveals that tax authorities around the world are closing in on crypto tax evasion by requiring exchanges to start collecting and reporting detailed trading records for local customers in the U.K. and more than 40 other countries.
The tax news in particular is less about revenue collection than it is about legitimacy. An asset class that cannot be reliably taxed cannot be fully integrated into national economies. By forcing exchanges to shoulder reporting responsibilities, governments are shifting cryptocurrency from a self-policed ecosystem to one embedded in public financial infrastructure.
Taken together, the start of the new year shows crypto firms and their regulatory bodies placing compliance at a premium over the industry’s previous Wild West pace of disruption and innovation.
While cryptocurrency’s early narrative was about disintermediation and escape from traditional finance, its emerging reality is about integration and accountability. The laws and enforcement actions shaping 2026 do not mark the end of crypto’s disruptive potential. They mark the end of its regulatory adolescence.
What comes next will be less about whether crypto can grow up, and more about what kind of adult it chooses to become.
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Crypto’s Regulatory Adolescence Is Over
The crypto industry’s early growth depended in part on regulatory ambiguity. Entrepreneurs could move quickly, investors could speculate freely, and users could experiment without many of the guardrails that define traditional finance. This environment produced extraordinary innovation, but also spectacular failures, from exchange collapses and stablecoin de-peggings to frauds that cost retail users billions of dollars.
For crypto firms, the operational implications of the growing compliance-first pivot are significant. Compliance teams must scale. Data systems must mature. Jurisdictional differences must be navigated with care. The cost of doing business will rise, particularly for smaller players. But so will the barriers to entry, which may ultimately reduce the prevalence of fly-by-night operators that have long plagued the industry’s reputation.
That recalibration is especially significant when viewed alongside the enforcement statistics that defined 2025.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for example, brought more than 30 crypto-related enforcement actions, resulting in $2.6 billion in penalties and restitution—the highest total ever for the sector.
The CFTC’s numbers were even more striking. Digital asset cases made up nearly half of its enforcement docket, generating more than $17 billion in monetary relief. These figures fueled headlines about a regulatory crackdown, but the underlying pattern tells a more nuanced story.
From the point of view of compliant cryptocurrency firms, the year’s worth of enforcement actions and criminal cases signal the SEC and CFTC’s increasing emphasis on clear-cut fraud and criminality, rather than debates over whether digital assets deserve security or commodity designations.
In doing so, the agencies are sending a clear message that although they hope to provide greater regulatory clarity for the crypto industry, they will continue to target bad actors that prey on investors.
Read more: Crypto Loses the Hype but Wins the Banks
How the Crypto Industry Is Embracing Compliance
The common thread running through these regulatory changes is not hostility to crypto, but impatience with its immaturity.
In its adolescence, the industry often argued that regulation would stifle innovation. Sometimes that was true. More often, it was an excuse for avoiding hard questions about consumer protection, systemic risk, and accountability. The result was a boom-and-bust cycle that enriched some, burned many, and left policymakers scrambling to respond after the fact.
What we are seeing now is a shift from reactive regulation to structural governance. Instead of banning activities outright, regulators are defining rules of the road. Instead of treating crypto as an anomaly, they are fitting it into existing legal and financial frameworks, modifying those frameworks where necessary.
The most important shifts in economic systems often happen not through grand declarations, but through incremental alignment. Commercial law updates. Consumer protection rules. Tax reporting standards. Bank supervision guidance. These are the levers that determine whether an industry remains marginal or becomes foundational.
Disruption, after all, is not synonymous with disorder. The internet did not lose its transformative power when telecom laws, privacy rules and consumer protections caught up to it. If anything, those guardrails enabled broader adoption and more sustainable business models. Crypto may be entering a similar phase.
