Since U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to public office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has scaled back its crypto enforcement agenda. It has dropped cases, closed investigations, and changed what it prioritizes for enforcement.
The most prominent case to fall out of the docket so far is the SEC’s lawsuit against Gemini Trust Company.
Earlier this week, the SEC, alongside Gemini’s exchange now operating as Gemini Space Station, filed a joint stipulation to dismiss the Earn case after a “100 percent in-kind return” of investors’ crypto assets.
The case was filed in early 2023 over its high-yield lending product, Gemini Earn. The exchange and its partner, Genesis Global Capital, were previously accused of offering unregistered securities. The bankruptcy process for the latter was set in motion in 2023.
After years of negotiations between the regulator and the company, the case has now come to a resolution.
The SEC had also cleared Gemini of a separate investigation unrelated to the Earn program last year. That probe, which had lingered for nearly two years, was closed without enforcement action.
The SEC’s changing stance on crypto
That decision coincided with a broader shift under new SEC leadership in 2025, which began softening and either dropping or pausing several crypto cases which have been regarded as regulatory overreach by the newly sworn in Trump administration at the time.
The year saw more cases dropped and investigations closed, with the SEC ending actions against at least 17 firms to date—including Coinbase, Binance, Ripple, Gemini, Kraken, ConsenSys, Cumberland DRW, Robinhood, Uniswap, OpenSea, Crypto.com, Yuga Labs, Immutable, Helium, PayPal, Aave, and Ondo Finance—as well as several other individual enforcement cases.
Most involved staking products, token listings, or wallet infrastructure, and were closed without penalties or further action.
The decisions were viewed as part of a broader directive under SEC Chair Paul Atkins to end legacy investigations inherited from the Gensler era, in which the industry faced a so-called war on crypto.
A “tactical experiment” on enforcement
Industry observers say the SEC is backing off broad crackdowns and focusing instead on cases where the agency sees clear harm or unresolved risk.
The SEC appears to be “testing a more selective, risk-based enforcement approach,” and is moving to a “tactical experiment” where “enforcement is being deliberately restrained,” Alice Frei, head of security and compliance at crypto agency Outset, told Decrypt.
These dismissals “indicate the SEC is recalibrating its enforcement playbook, moving away from headline driven crypto cases,” Leo Fan, founder and CEO of on-chain compute platform Cysic, told Decrypt.
The moves show the agency is pursuing “legal certainty and economic competitiveness, acknowledging that enforcement alone is not an effective framework for governing decentralised technologies,” Fan added.
It could also be “a change in enforcement posture,” Shady El Damaty, co-founder of Human.tech, told Decrypt, adding that the SEC appears to be “deprioritizing legacy crypto cases where investor harm has already been resolved and where continued litigation offers limited regulatory upside.”
“The underlying securities framework has not been rewritten, but the agency is signaling greater discretion in how and when it applies it to crypto,” El Damaty said.
Changes in the agency’s posture "coincided with the passing of the GENIUS Act," Sri Balan Krishnan, associate legal counsel at decentralized AI platform Pundi AI, told Decrypt.
“We now have clarity and certainty over the do's and the don'ts in the crypto laws of the U.S." Balan Krishnan noted, adding that it "ends almost half a decade of anxiety over how the courts will rule in important crypto cases."
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