DOJ narrows digital-asset enforcement priorities

What changed

The Deputy Attorney General directed DOJ personnel to stop using criminal enforcement to create digital-asset regulatory frameworks and to focus cases on knowing or willful violations and conduct involving investor victimization, terrorism, narcotics, human trafficking, organized crime, hacking, or illicit finance. The memorandum also disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and restricted charges against exchanges, mixers, and wallets based only on end-user conduct or unwitting regulatory violations.

Who it affects

• Digital-asset businesses
• investment advisers conducting digital-asset diligence
• compliance and AML teams
• custodians
• exchanges
• wallet and mixer providers
• digital-asset investors

What is still open

• How individual U.S. Attorney offices will apply the memorandum to particular facts
• The relationship between narrowed criminal priorities and civil regulatory enforcement

What it means for an advisor

• Recalibrate enforcement-risk diligence to the new DOJ priorities without treating the memorandum as a safe harbor or reducing independent securities, commodities, sanctions, AML, custody, or fiduciary analysis.