ABA updates white paper on digital assets and cryptocurrencies  

By American Bar Association

The American Bar Association Business Law Section recently published a nearly 470-page white paper on “Digital and Digitized Assets: Federal and State Jurisdictional Issues. The white paper was drafted by the section’s Derivatives and Futures Law Committee and provides a comprehensive survey of the regulation of crypto-currencies and other digital assets to assist legal practitioners, policy makers and others interested in digital assets.

The white paper also summarizes “the existing federal and state regulatory regimes governing digital assets in the United States, discusses the emerging issues that affect digital asset markets and their participants and outlines analogous efforts taken by international regulators and other national governments.”

The white paper provides:

• Updates on digital and blockchain technologies, including recent developments in Web 3.0 and decentralized finance;

• Analysis of the application of the Commodity Exchange Act and federal securities laws to transactions in digital assets and crypto-currencies;

• Analysis of the current positions and recent enforcement actions of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in this area;

• Analysis of the legal processes available to the CFTC and SEC to resolve the problematic issues arising from their overlapping and potentially conflicting authority;

• Analysis of the role and positions of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department;

• A survey of state laws regulating transactions in digital assets and crypto-currencies; and

• An analysis of approaches the United Kingdom, the European Union, key Caribbean countries and countries in Asia have taken to regulating these products.


(https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2025/12/aba-business-law-digital-assets-cryptocurrencies/)

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