The new personnel guide published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on decentralized finance (DeFi) interfaces in April made a great impact in the industry. The Decentralized Financial Education Fund (DeFi Education Fund) and more than 35 institutions, including well-known names such as a16z crypto, Aptos Labs, Uniswap, Chainlink, Paradigm, Solana Policy Institute and Phantom, applied to the SEC and requested that this temporary guidance be turned into a permanent, public regulation.
What’s in the SEC’s April guidance?
The SEC’s Division of Markets and Trading exempted certain operators of certain crypto interfaces from the obligation to register as broker-dealers in a staff memorandum published on April 13. This exception covers frontend providers where users control their own assets and connect to DeFi protocols.
User interface providers specified within the scope of the guide will be able to charge users for transactions without registration as a broker-dealer. However, these regulations are limited only to a certain framework and are generally temporary.
Why does the DeFi ecosystem want permanent regulation?
The current guidance was prepared to be either converted into a permanent rule or withdrawn within five years from the date of publication. DeFi Education Fund and many industry representatives are concerned that the SEC administration can easily change the interim guides, which may change in the future. For this reason, industry actors want an official and public legal framework to be established so that regulatory clarity is permanent and cannot be reversed by any political or administrative changes.
It is emphasized that if uncertainty in regulation continues, there may be a serious slowdown in the development of blockchain technology and investor access to the market will be restricted.
New privacy proposal is on the agenda in Ethereum
In parallel with the SEC’s guide, the proposal titled EIP-8182 shared by Tom Lehman, one of the Ethereum developers, on the X platform also became a subject of discussion. This proposal envisages adding a private transfer feature built into Ethereum’s own protocol.
According to the proposal, with a shared and protected pool that will be directly integrated into the Ethereum chain, users will be able to make secret transfers at the protocol level, without third-party tools. The ZK-proof verification system will also be directly integrated into this pool.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin had previously brought up the direct integration of Railgun-like privacy tools for wallets in April 2025, thus paving the way for users to make more secure and private transactions.
The proposal states that there will be no admin keys, governance tokens or on-chain upgrade mechanisms in the proposed pool. The process will only proceed with Ethereum’s hard fork decisions.
If this proposal is implemented, the possibility of privacy transactions on the protocol basis may lead to the broker-dealer boundaries for the interfaces that the SEC tries to define in its new guideline to become more complex in the future. Front-end wallets in particular offer private sending by default, which can make determining regulatory lines even more difficult.
