The U.S. Department of the Treasury has released a report in which it asserts that regulators need to conduct more anti-money laundering and terrorism financing oversight on decentralized finance due to vulnerabilities in the space. It notes that many DeFi services fail to comply with Bank Secrecy Act obligations, which allows bad actors to exploit the technology.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is seeking to sell Signet, the payments network for crypto companies operated by the now-failed Signature Bank. A spokesperson for the regulator confirmed the plan after the FDIC asked crypto depositors at Signature to close their accounts and move their money by April 5.

At a Punchbowl News event this morning House Financial Services Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) said that he believes creating a new regulator for digital assets is not a “political reality” and confirmed that SEC Chairman Gensler will testify before the committee on April 18 . He noted that he is particularly interested in discussing a digital asset regulatory regime with Gensler. Additionally, he announced that he has been working with House Agriculture Chair GT Thompson (R-PA) to formulate a system for regulating digital assets as securities and commodities, and thus he is confident that the chamber can move forward on a market structure bill. He hopes to make progress on this legislation and a stablecoin bill by the summer.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) sent a letter to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation asking if the agency has instructed banks not to provide services to cryptocurrency companies. He wrote that efforts to “weaponize” instability in the financial sector for legal cryptocurrency activity could lead to broader financial instability.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced a lawsuit against Justin Sun, the owner of file sharing platform BitTorrent Inc., for alleged fraudulent and unregistered sale of a pair of crypto tokens and settled with eight celebrity backers of the coins. The SEC alleges that Sun and three of his companies, Tron Foundation Ltd., BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc., offered and sold the coins Tronix and BitTorrent without registering with the SEC.

The newest Economic Report of the President, transmitted to Congress this month, dismisses arguments regarding cryptocurrency’s benefits and notes its costs to consumers, the environment, and the financial system. The report includes a chapter on the “perceived appeal” of crypto assets as opposed to the “reality’ and explains, “Indeed, crypto assets to date do not appear to offer investments with any fundamental value, nor do they act as an effective alternative to fiat money, improve financial inclusion, or make payments more efficient; instead, their innovation has been mostly about creating artificial scarcity in order to support crypto assets’ prices — and many of them have no fundamental value.”

Coinbase, the largest digital currency exchange in the U.S., announced on March 22 that the SEC has indicated that it plans to take enforcement action against the company following an investigation of its trading, crypto staking, and wallet.

Today Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill to block the United States Federal Reserve from launching a “direct-to-consumer” central bank digital currency because he said it “could be used as a financial surveillance tool by the federal government.” The bill is cosponsored by Sens. Mike Braun (R-IN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Today crypto exchange Coinbase proactively submitted a petition to the SEC arguing that proof-of-stake blockchain staking services cannot be universally labeled as securities.