The United States government is about to do something that crypto itself hasn't done in 15 years: define what decentralized actually means. Now, once again, the Clarity Act has got pushback, the SEC has canceled Friday's meeting on proposed crypto rules, and the Senate didn't vote on the Clarity Act. But what I'm excited about is that the regulation some people are thinking is going to be bullish for crypto could actually be a disaster for a lot of cryptocurrencies that have spent years marketing themselves as something that's decentralized — when the truth is that their websites, that almost everything besides tiny bits of data on the blockchain, is centralized. Regulation can actually crush a lot of these fake decentralized coins.
I've been saying for years, especially once I found ICP, that crypto has basically just recreated our existing banking system. Even Bitcoin has recreated it, with a tiny amount of people controlling almost all the Bitcoin. The blockchain itself has become nearly irrelevant, because all the price action and almost all the transactions — like 99% of anything that supposedly happens with Bitcoin — is on some centralized exchange. That makes the blockchain almost totally irrelevant.
What the Regulation Actually Says So Far
There are a few things you need to know about this that I think will be helpful. First, we already have stablecoin regulation that passed in 2025, and the Treasury is now actually implementing it, which is good. Stablecoins are one of the easiest, most obvious places to regulate, and they're now being brought under the Bank Secrecy Act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act, and all that stuff. So crypto isn't replacing the existing financial system — it is just getting brought into it.
And the "is every crypto a security?" argument has already changed dramatically as well, with the SEC saying most cryptos themselves are not securities. They've got a basic taxonomy now, which is funny because at some point all these things are supposed to make crypto go up and go bullish.
That leads us into the Clarity Act. This is a huge unfinished piece that is supposed to divide things between the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. It has rules for intermediaries that impose anti-money laundering and KYC — and ICP is the only blockchain that's in position to actually put all of that on chain, where you could use Internet Identity to put KYC straight into your Internet Identity itself. None of these other ones can. A lot of these obligations are going to come down on exchanges, brokers, dealers, and even come into DeFi. These are designed to protect customers, and this could be very bad for a lot of coins that are fake decentralized, that are easily attackable, and that could be crushed with regulation. Right now we have to wait at least another month to see whether we can get the 60 votes on this in the Senate or not.
I'm finally filming this at like 10:30. I filmed 122 videos already today. But I thought, we'll get one out for you guys too. And it's kind of silly that the SEC canceled the meeting when this is so important.
Regulatory Clarity Won't Save Fake Decentralization
It's funny to me that so many people in crypto think regulatory clarity is going to save their coin. To me, regulatory clarity should — that doesn't mean it will, but it should — bring out ICP, because ICP has the infrastructure to back up the claims. The rest of these coins don't. They're not decentralized. They're controlled by a small group of people, and they stand to lose a lot from regulatory clarity. Now, maybe they're able to just pay people to regulate in their favor — that's possible. But still, regulatory clarity could crush a lot of the crypto industry, especially a bunch of the junk coins that can't afford to get themselves written properly into the regulation and can't afford to have their infrastructure actually back all this up.
Just because all these things are potentially coming down with legislation doesn't mean some garbage layer one should be worth $8 billion. I think now is the time to really take inventory of what the coins you have actually do. This isn't financial advice. I only hold ICP, because it is the most real thing in crypto. It is the truth. It is the way. It is the light.
The Sad State Crypto Got Itself Into
I'm really disappointed with where crypto's gotten, because Bitcoin and Ethereum were exciting — in theory, they removed trusted intermediaries. But now, when we look at where everything is: centralized crypto exchanges are becoming regulated financial institutions. Stablecoin issuers are regulated, with all the anti-money laundering, KYC, and sanctions requirements. You've got dirty Bitcoin these days, and different government agencies ruling on it. We started off in crypto with the idea of being your own bank — and you're not your own bank when you're on Coinbase. Somebody could push a button and shut your Coinbase account off. All kinds of people could push a button and shut your Coinbase account off. That's just the same in a lot of ways as a bank account right now.
So crypto's gotten into a really sad state, where the original thing that got me into Bitcoin in 2014 seems to be pretty much gone. The only thing that psychs me up in crypto today is ICP, because it's doing something genuinely valuable for the world. The rest of these coins are just logos on what, at this point, are centralized trading apps that make huge profits from you trading logos you don't understand. People have said, yeah, I bought a couple of these coins because I like their logos — and I've done that too, so I know what that's like. I got into crypto for a new financial system. I hope regulatory clarity will cut out a lot of the garbage in crypto and make it easier for something like ICP to shine. But we're going to have to wait longer for that to happen.
In the meantime, it's a good time to investigate: what can your blockchain actually do? Which coins in your portfolio do you hate and might want to sell? And how much more can you research ICP? If you want to see how I break down coins like this one by one, watch my Crypto Reviews playlist.
If you enjoyed this, I have a website hosted on the ICP blockchain, and I invite you to come check it out. I've got a chat built directly into the website, which you can pay for with ICP and credit cards. This shows off the technology. You can tip if you want to, and there's a dedicated tips page where your message and your tip will be shown off. This is incredible technology on my website — and this is what crypto can do, instead of the sad state of what the rest of crypto does, which is being speculation.