Ethan Ostroff, Pete Jeydel, and Peter Leary discuss trends and lessons learned from the Office of Foreign Assets Control civil enforcement actions and Department of Justice criminal prosecutions related to digital assets.
In this episode of Crypto Exchange, host Ethan Ostroff is joined by his colleagues Pete Jeydel and Peter Leary to discuss trends and lessons learned from recent civil enforcement actions by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and from Department of Justice (DOJ) criminal prosecutions related to digital assets.
Their discussion covers key compliance lessons for fintech and digital asset companies, including some of the nuances of a robust screening process for companies in this space. They delve into the Binance case, illustrating how noncompliance can escalate from civil to criminal enforcement. The episode also explores the implications of recent policy shifts under the Trump administration, including the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve and the designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
The Crypto Exchange — Navigating 2025: Trends in OFAC and DOJ Enforcement for Digital Assets
Host: Ethan Ostroff
Guests: Pete Jeydel and Peter Leary
Aired: April 7, 2025
Ethan Ostroff:
Welcome to another episode of The Crypto Exchange, a Troutman Pepper Locke podcast, focusing on the world of digital assets. I'm Ethan Ostroff, a co-host of the podcast and a partner at Troutman Pepper Locke. Before we jump into today's episode, let me remind you to visit and subscribe to our blogs, ConsumerFinancialServicesLawMonitor.com, and TroutmanFinancialServices.com. Don't forget to check out our other podcasts on troutman.com/podcast.
Today, I'm joined by my partners Pete Jeydel and Peter Leary to discuss trends and lessons learned from OFAC civil enforcement actions and criminal prosecutions by the Department of Justice related to digital assets, including what we might expect in the enforcement context during the Trump administration.
Guys, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm looking forward to discussing some crucial insights for companies to ensure they stay compliant and avoid costly mistakes. I want to start by taking a minute to allow our new partner, Peter Leary, to introduce himself to our listeners. Our listeners may be familiar with Pete Jeydel from prior episodes of our podcast. Peter Leary joined our firm in January of 2025 after serving most recently as the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, and we're thrilled to have Peter join us. I thought, Peter, you might just introduce yourself to our listeners a little bit.
Peter Leary:
Great. Thank you, Ethan. I'm excited to be here and look forward to this conversation. It's definitely an interesting time to be talking about these issues right now. I joined Troutman Pepper Locke, as you mentioned, in January of this year, after nearly 18 years with the Department of Justice. I started my career through the honors program at Main Justice in Washington, D.C., with a group called the Federal Programs Branch. Federal Programs Branch focuses on defending challenges to executive branch decisions, at the very high-level matters, and a lot of those were constitutional in nature.
I also spent several years there working with the team of DOJ attorneys that reviews sanctions designations by the Treasury and State Department. When OFAC would propose a designation, our group of DOJ attorneys would review that record to ensure that were there to be a challenging court that that record would be upheld by the court ultimately. After five years at Main Justice, I joined the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Georgia as a criminal AUSA and worked as a line prosecutor there for several years, serving is both the computer hacking and intellectual property prosecutor for the office, also known as a CHIP, as well as the national security cyber specialist.
In those roles, I got the opportunity to work on a lot of cyber cases, often involving crypto matters, among other nice things, was awarded the International Association of Chiefs of Police Investigation of the Year with partners from the FBI and the Georgia Bureau investigations for a dark net matter that we investigated and ultimately, convicted an individual. Then transitioned to serving as the first assistant US Attorney under President Trump's nominee as US Attorney. Charlie Peeler, who is also a partner in the Atlanta office. After serving as the FAUSA under US Attorney Peeler, I ultimately became the presidentially appointed US Attorney under President Biden and served as US Attorney there in the office for approximately four years. Really excited to be joining Troutman to be working with people like you and Pete. I’m really excited to bring some of that expertise to our clients.
Ethan Ostroff:
Yeah, we're excited to have you. I think your background in high-stakes litigation and understanding of government processes is really going to help our firm's capabilities in defending clients against criminal liability and navigating complex legal challenges, in particular, as they relate to digital assets. We really appreciate you joining us today. I thought for our listeners, Pete Jeydel, I'm just going to refer to as Pete, right? Then Peter Leary will be Peter. Pete, I thought we might start talking today about some trends and lessons learned from OFAC Crypto Enforcement actions over the past several years. Some of the mistakes made and how companies might go about thinking about how they can stay out of trouble.
Pete Jeydel:
Awesome. Thank you. Well, yeah. I'm Pete, not Peter. Pete Jeydel. Peter, if you'd prefer, we can do Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or something. I call it Tweedledee. Anyway, yeah. Pete and Peter. I'm Pete. I am the firm's OFAC nerd. I'm going to give you all kinds of lessons learned about OFAC, looking at their guidance, their civil enforcement and DOJ criminal enforcement in the sanction space. Over the last few years, what can we learn? What have companies done that's gotten them in trouble? How do you comply? If you're a FinTech digital asset company, what are the key things you need to think about to comply with OFAC sanctions?
First, maybe we're going to talk more about this later, but just to address the elephant in the room, before the listeners totally tune me out and say, “None of this matters anymore. Trump administration's in office now. There's no more enforcement. There's no more FCPA, right?” Well, no. Absolutely wrong. This stuff, these basic mechanics, sanctions compliance are going nowhere. These are going to stay in place. OFAC enforcement is going to go up. It's not going to go down. We'll talk more about that later, but please don't tune me out. This is going to be interesting and it's important. It's going to help you keep your company out of trouble.
What can we glean from OFAC from its guidance and enforcement actions over the years? How do you comply for companies in this sector? Just to get it out of the way, there's some pretty obvious general stuff, general compliance lessons. You've got to have a strong management commitment, policies and procedures, a compliance function that's independent and resourced. You have to do risk assessments. If you buy a new business, you have to update your risk assessment, audits, record keeping, training, etc., etc. There's a lot of a general stuff.
Okay. Getting a little bit more specific, in the OFAC world, you have to have specific procedures in place for blocked property. What do you do with that? If you have prohibited transactions that you reject, or blocked property, you have to report that to OFAC. There's specific procedures you have to have in place. There are specific AML procedures. Obviously, you have to do SAR filing, suspicious activity reports. There's some regime-specific compliance procedures you have to have in place. Getting a little bit more into the weeds from the OFAC side, really comes down to screening, obviously. Everybody knows that. You have to do screening if you're going to comply with OFAC rules. Screening has to be risk-based. What does that mean? It depends on the company. There's a lot of nuances about screening and how you do it. It's not helpful just to say you have to do screening. When do you screen? You have to screen when you onboard a customer, obviously. That's the most basic.
Regulators will say, you need to screen when the data changes. If your customer gets a new address, you have to screen that new address. Importantly, you have to screen transactionally in many cases. We'll see this in the specific cases that we'll talk about. When an existing customer does a transaction, there may be new data that needs to be screened. You may need to screen not just your customers, but also counterparty. If your counterparty is using a service provider, another exchange, screen that. Again, the transactional data. Sometimes, and there's a case on this we'll talk about, you may need to screen other third parties, your customer’s customers. That's going to depend. When to screen, who to screen, what to screen? You have to screen name, obviously.
Other identifying data in this context, though, wallet address. Digging into identity with ownership and control. In some instances, you have to look at citizenship and residency for sanctions compliance purposes. If you have an entity, where is it based? All kinds of location data. Location is not simple in the digital sector. Obviously, physical address, but IP address, if you're taking email data as part of your onboarding, country code, top level domain can indicate where someone's located. Then, how do you screen? There's all kinds of fuzzy logic, settings, getting your balance of false negatives and false positives right.
I don't have all the answers, but depends on each company, these are some of the considerations to have in mind. Screening is not an easy thing to do, or to set up. Then screening is not just list screening. Sometimes, you have to go beyond the lists, and we'll see this in the Binance case.
Ethan Ostroff:
Yeah, I was thinking maybe we could dive in and talk a little bit about that Binance case, and what are the lessons learned, we can take away from that 2023 enforcement action? I mean, the largest civil penalty in OFAC and FinCEN history, you had OFAC, DOJ, FinCEN, and CFTC all involved, right? I thought, maybe Pete, you could talk a little bit about that. Then, maybe Peter give us your take about what turned Binance into a criminal case. In other words, what are companies you need to understand about the civil enforcement actions crossing the line into criminal prosecution?
Pete Jeydel:
All right, well, I'll take a hit at the civil side. Binance, most people know it as the criminal case, and that's what Peter's going to talk about, but there's also OFAC civil enforcement action. It's not the most nuanced case in a lot of ways, right? I mean, it was a criminal case, so they did a lot of things fairly obviously wrong. What was interesting from the OFAC perspective was the jurisdictional part of the case. Binance is based in the Caymans, and their main platform, binance.com, the global free-for-all from a compliance perspective, global platform, was supposed to actually, not just to some degree, geo-block sanctions targets, but also geo-block the United States. They were supposed to be keeping US users off the binance.com global platform, and they had a separate binance.us that was the more compliant platform.
They, through a number of mechanisms, they essentially allowed users to bypass their geo-blocking. They allowed them to use VPNs. They encouraged games and trickery on their onboarding. Even though this is a non-US platform that tried to operate outside the US, at the end of the day, they had US users on this global platform outside of the binance.us on the main binance.com platform. They were matching US users' trades with trades of sanctions targets. That's what got them in trouble, and OFAC looked at their compliance and just said, “Look, this is window dressing. It's not real compliance. You had some terms of use. You had things, but you had active means that you encouraged your users to circumvent your controls. That's where it got criminal.”
Ethan Ostroff:
Got you. Yeah. I was going to say, so Peter, what took that civil enforcement matter and turned it into a criminal case?
Peter Leary:
There were several factors. Really, this was a perfect storm. I mean, some of the things that Pete's been talking about, for example, the need to file SARS. Binance was not filing any SARS. This was not that they were not filing them at a certain level, or missing SARS that should have been filed. They were simply not filing SARS. They didn't implement a comprehensive Know Your Customer Protocol. Again, the KYC protocols that you'd look for in an effective AML program, they simply had none of it. When we're looking at the criminal case and asking from a mens rea standpoint, what is the standard of proof of their knowledge? They were exceptionally willful in the absolute lack of those protocols and compliance issues.
Then, one has to ask next, what were they aware of? Did they know just what the results would be from the lack of these protocols? Here, there was internal correspondence that came up in the criminal case that made it very obvious that they knew exactly what the results would be of the way they'd set up the platform. There was an internal email where one compliance employee wrote, “We need a banner. Is washing drug money too hard these days? Come to Binance. We got cake for you.”
Again, this was not just they didn't have the controls in place. There was clear evidence they knew exactly what the result would be. Then the final piece, of course, becomes what was the results? Here, you had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars transferring from countries that were subject to sanctions. This was Syria, Iran, China. It was the exact countries, and often, the exact organizations that the United States was putting sanctions in place to monitor, or to stop the transfer of money. When folks ask, are these crypto platforms legitimate? Or are they simply money laundering for bad actors? Again, Binance was the perfect storm that they did not have the necessary compliance pieces in place. They knew exactly what the result would be. In fact, that result is what came to pass.
Ethan Ostroff:
Interesting. Bringing this forward to what's going on now at the Department of Justice and the shakeup and the shift to immigration enforcement, do you have any thoughts about what all this means and how the landscape has changed here in the first couple of months of the new administration?
Peter Leary:
I do. I think it's important to note that there's so much change so quickly that to some degree forecasting will need to be revisited on a regular basis. Specifically, from the crypto lens, the creation of the strategic Bitcoin reserve last week by executive order by President Trump is a big deal. For listeners who may not be aware of this, again, this is a March 6th executive order that refers to Bitcoin as digital gold and states that the United States is going to retain Bitcoin specifically that it had obtained through criminal, or civil forfeitures. It is not going to purchase additional Bitcoin, but it is also not going to divest itself of Bitcoin. This really is establishing the strategic reserve.
Ethan Ostroff:
Well, there's a lot of pushback on what the actual reasons behind this are and questions about what this actually means and does it really matter, right? I think at least for some people, they have concerns that it's motivated by something other than a belief in the various different use cases of Bitcoin and trying to understand how actually this would all work and why do it if you're not accumulating more, right?
Pete Jeydel:
On that point, I mean, Peter, if you're a prosecutor and you see the president saying, “We're not going to appropriate funds to buy Bitcoin, but I want more Bitcoin. I want to develop this strategic reserve.” You're a prosecutor, you've got the tools to put your hands on some Bitcoin, right? Does this create a new incentive structure for prosecutors? Are we going to see forfeitures? Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?
Peter Leary:
I think that forfeiture question is a very interesting one, because in any prosecution, again, criminal or civil matter, where assets are being seized, at times, these are exclusively federal, but often, they're involving state and local law enforcement agencies as well. I think one of the questions that is going to arise is it's always controversial who gets what share of the pie, who gets what percentage, who gets what assets. Again, I think that will be interesting to see, are we going to see the federal entities want the Bitcoin piece of the pie because of this executive order? One of the other big questions, of course, with this executive order coming out, are we going to see other countries establish similar reserves? Then, when we're dealing with these often international investigations, how is that pie going to be divided? I do think there's going to be a lot of very interesting forfeiture fights that arise from that executive order.
Ethan Ostroff:
In talking about what the new attorney general has been doing, there's been dissolving different units and task forces and moving the pieces around on the chessboard, how at all do you think that impacts the digital assets landscape? Do you think that's going to result in potentially less DOJ criminal enforcement and perhaps, more OFAC civil enforcement, or do you have any thoughts about that?
Peter Leary:
I'll do one thing and I'll lead the OFAC piece to Pete. I mean, I do think one can look back on President Trump's first term and there was a very conscious, very real shift of resources out of Main Justice and into the US attorney's offices. Everything we've seen so far has indicated that is going to be the same playbook here. We can talk more a little bit later about exactly what some of those shifts look like, but you're going to see, I think, a de-emphasis of funding, of resources, of personnel at Main Justice, and some of those resources will be shipped to the attorney's offices.
One of the points that AG Bondi emphasized recently was that she wanted to remove bureaucratic shackles on US attorney's offices. A lot of standard approval processes are being eliminated, a lot more power is being devolved to United States attorney’s offices. Again, I think you're going to see that across the board and I certainly think that's going to impact crypto and those prosecutions.
Pete Jeydel:
Yeah. I mean, so tell me, Peter, in the sanction space specifically, we're talking about forfeiture. I mean, two of the main organizations that were set up at DOJ to do forfeiture have been dissolved. Their task force kleptocapture on Russia side, largely a forfeiture organization, the kleptocracy asset recovery initiative at MLARS. These resources and focus is going to shift out to the US attorneys. If you're a US attorney, do you need those Main Justice resources to pursue a forfeiture case? How is that going to impact the enforcement approach?
Peter Leary:
I think it's two points. Number one, it's important to recognize that all US attorney's offices are not created equal in terms of resources and expertise. There are some US attorney's offices that have a larger footprint in this space already, and I think are going to really leap at the opportunity to not interact with, or be slowed down with as they may perceive by Main Justice. I think there are a lot of other US attorney's offices that don't have those resources to that same degree and that have heavily relied on Main Justice partnerships. I'll be curious to see if some of those attorneys end up shifting from Main Justice into US attorney's offices and creating smaller but active task forces in that space.
Again, if you leave Main Justice and you show up at a US attorney's office that hasn't done a lot of work in this in the past, you may be able to create something from whole cloth that ends up being a force multiplier. Now, having said that, I do think, obviously, there's going to be a period of shake up here. What I do also wonder is every administration comes in and wants to shake things up, wants to put their own stamp on something. I wonder if we're going to see a task force kleptocapture, or a kleptocracy asset recovery initiative rebranded, and it's going to have a new name. The administration is going to recognize that there's a lot of expertise there and there's a lot of folks who know how to do it. So, they may shift the priority. They may change the name, but we may end up in a very similar space. Again, that's not unique. That is fairly common in the department.
Ethan Ostroff:
We'll see the digital gold recovery initiative.
Peter Leary:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Ethan Ostroff:
Could you also talk a little bit about what's described as the cartel total elimination policy and how that folds into the world of digital assets and enforcement actions?
Pete Jeydel:
I think both of us can talk about this. There's a lot to say about this. There's the actual legal changes, which are really significant. There's also the bureaucratic and resourcing changes that this is going to give rise to. Maybe I'll start with just the nitty-gritty of what are some of the specific changes that have been enacted. This isn't just talk. This isn't just political. Signaling. They have actually taken this administration really significant action against the cartels by designating them as foreign terrorist organizations. It's a big deal. It's a really significant game-changer for financial institutions, for everyone who does business in Mexico in particular, throughout Latin America.
A lot of people don't appreciate what's changed here. I mean, these cartels, it’s not under the Biden administration. It was open-season, do business with the cartels. They were SDNs. They were blocked by OFAC under the Kingpin Act, Narcotics, Transnational Criminal Organization sanctions. They were off limits, but this is a whole new ballgame, so a bunch of things. They've now been designated under additional OFAC authorities, SDGT, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, so terrorism designations by OFAC it opens up a whole new set of enforcement tools for the government.
Ethan Ostroff:
To me, it's the real intersection of countering the financing of terrorism and the world of digital assets, where anyone who's working in this digital asset space that's moving any type of digital asset, any type of stablecoin, has to understand what these new requirements and designations mean, because it can impact anyone who's moving various types of assets around on chain.
Pete Jeydel:
Yeah. I mean, the executive order that calls for this, it basically says, parts of Latin America and Mexico, the cartels operate as quasi-governmental organizations. These organizations are present throughout certain areas of these targeted countries, and the regulatory landscape has changed dramatically for financial institutions. Under these terrorism authorities now, the US government has much broader leeway to look at, for example, swift messages, international databases and other international cooperation mechanisms that they'll be looking at under these terrorism cooperation programs to generate enforcement leads. The investigation risk is going to go up a lot, but the rules are changing hugely.
The OFAC paradigm is you have to screen for SDNs. There's the 50% rule. Entities 50% are more owned by SDNs. But under the new FTO, Foreign Terrorist Organization OFAC regulations, not just entities 50% are more owned by these organizations, but also their agents. How do you screen for their agents? The regulations say that persons that are acting on behalf of the cartel, persons that are controlled by the cartel, not just ownership, but actually activity-based screening. That's a tall order for a financial institution to put that type of filter in place that's going to be effective. Much less at a right line than what we see under the normal OFAC paradigm.
Ethan Ostroff:
I mean, to me, I think of this in the context of stablecoin issuers, right? People are moving stablecoins cross-border, as a way to avoid the otherwise increased costs of international remittances. It dovetails into this total elimination policy, where if you're moving money back and forth, or facilitating the movement of money back and forth across our borders with anyone in LATAM, this is a real concern, right?
Pete Jeydel:
Yeah, hugely. Going back to Binance, just this week or last week, SDNY allowed a preliminary jurisdictional grounds, allowed a case to move forward, where some victims, or estate family members of the victims of the October 7th attack in Israel are suing Binance for aiding and abetting the terrorist attack by facilitating financial transactions, digital asset transactions for with Hamas and other terrorist groups, FTOs. There had been some Supreme Court limitations on that theory, but in the Binance case, it's moving forward. It's a different paradigm when you're actually facilitating financial transactions with these foreign terrorist organizations.
You can imagine, if you're a digital asset company that does business in Latin America, not only do you have OFAC risk, you have criminal risk that Peter can talk about more. You have the risk of private action, civil liability, cases brought by victims of terrorism. If you're AML and OFAC sanctions compliance are not up to snuff, that can lead to civil liability to victims. It's a whole new world. The level of risk and complexity is many multiples of what it used to be for financial institutions operating in Mexico and Latin America.
Ethan Ostroff:
Peter, what are your thoughts about this total elimination policy and how it may impact criminal prosecutions?
Peter Leary:
To echo what Pete said, the world is only getting riskier for companies, particularly for companies who are dealing in the crypto space. Even though the Trump administration is properly viewed as pro crypto, you're going to see a lot of focus on this cartel elimination policy that the companies that may be dealing with these organizations are going to face increased scrutiny. While crypto in general may be favored, what it's being used for is going to be carefully scrutinized. Again, the fact that many of these criminal organizations are quite enmeshed in many countries, means that there's going to be a lot of scrutiny. I think you're going to see it obviously increase prosecutions.
I would note one thing, I find interesting is these are not simple, quick prosecutions. These are labor intensive. These are resource intensive. These are complex. Again, if you look at the Binance prosecution, I believe that DOJ investigation launched in 2018, if not before. It took until 2023 before you see charges being filed. This is going to take a while to roll out. It's going to take a while before you see these charges being brought, I think, but they will be coming. again, you see these type of prosecutions often span administrations because the ball gets rolling, the criminal liability is there, and the statute of limitations are lengthy enough that allow these prosecutions to take several years to develop before they're ultimately brought.
Ethan Ostroff:
I thought we may finish up today's episode, guys, by just asking each of you for any thoughts, or predictions on the outlook for enforcement during the Trump administration, any thoughts about some things we may see that may surprise people?
Pete Jeydel:
I can start. I mean, going back to where we started this episode, OFAC compliance, these details, they do matter. This is going to continue. It's going to escalate. It's not going away. I think in these national security areas, the Trump administration is going to take a very tough enforcement approach on their key targeted areas, China, Iran, terrorism, cartels. What are we going to see, China, the Republicans have been talking for years about how the government's not been aggressive enough in targeting Chinese financial institutions for facilitating sanctions evasion with respect to Iran, etc., export control, evasion and the like. Are we going to see Chinese banks being targeted? I don't know, but that's on the table.
In the Russia sphere, everybody says, Russia enforcement's gone, Task Force Kleptocapture has been dissolved, totally wrong in my view. Political developments will influence this, of course. For the time being, I mean, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, has said, “We're going to ramp up our sanctions to force Russia to the table.” These broad sanctions authorities remain in effect, and it's not just been rhetoric. We've seen significant action under the Trump administration already going after Russia.
We saw pretty typical Biden era, multilateral sanctions action against these servers, a Russia-based bulletproof hosting provider supporting Blockbit and other ransomware groups. Server takedown by the Dutch, so multilateral action. We saw a takedown just last week of Garantex, which is touching on the political level sensitive stuff in Russia. Garantex is viewed as being – it's one of the largest Russian virtual currency exchanges. A lot of people say, it's close to the Russian government, even the indictment noted, with some jealousy by the FBI that Garantex had been cooperating with Russian law enforcement. We saw a huge multilateral takedown led by the US of this Russian exchange. I think we're seeing serious action by the Trump administration. That's going to continue. Obviously, political developments could impact that, but we're not there yet.
Peter Leary:
I would say I am watching three things. First, when you look at the February 5th total elimination memo from the AG in the IEEPA space, it removes the approval requirements that used to flow through the National Security Division or NSD. Specifically, the memo removes the preexisting requirement to obtain an approval for search warrants related to IEEPA charges, or material witness warrants for investigations targeting members or associates of a cartel. Previously there was a potential bottleneck at NSD, now you’ve got 93 US Attorney's offices, which only have to give a 24-hour advance notice of intent to seek charges, or apply for warrants. In other words, a process that was laborious before could be significantly streamlined, or it could be more chaotic. Instead of one decision point at Main Justice, you may have dozens, nearly 100 decision makers who could be moving all at once. I think that's going to be a big deal to track.
Second, I think when you look at the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve creation, it's of course just an executive order. That can be undone with a stroke of a pen, whether that's President Trump's pen, or some subsequent President's pen. There's been a lot of legislation percolating in that space. I'd be very curious to see the degree to which that Strategic Reserve might be enshrined in statute. Again, to Pete’s point earlier, it's one thing to say we're going to do this, but the devil's often in the details. As that gets fleshed out, I think that will be interesting to track. Again, some of those details may come from Congress instead of from the executive branch.
Third, I think one thing that I'm personally interested in having served as a presidential appointed US Attorney is who ends up in those roles in the US Attorney's offices. Because that process is starting. There have been a handful of folks nominated so far. I know there's a lot of work being done behind the scenes in that space, but seeing who comes into those roles, I think the US attorneys are going to have an outsized importance in this space in the next few years, and asking who is being selected for those roles and what are their priorities and how do they want to advance the President's agenda and/or make a name for themselves. It's going to be very interesting to track who those individuals are and see what they do with this new power that they've been given.
Ethan Ostroff:
Yeah, it's a great point, Peter. I think our relationships with so many of them could very well be really important for a variety of different clients, right? I think one of the threads I'm going to be trying to track is when I think about this from a national security countering the financing of terrorism perspective, there is this potential for a real crackdown on state-backed use and state-backed actors. These are obviously the biggest criminal heist in history, right, very recently by hackers involving cryptocurrency.
To me, there's a tension with that, and the idea of individuals being able to use digital currencies in a way that allows them to maintain privacy and to remove the middleman and to remain without any government oversight in their day-to-day financial dealings. There's a real, in my view, a real tension there that we're going to see play out in the months and years to come. I'm interested in watching that as we go and look forward to talking with you both about more of these issues.
Pete and Peter, really want to thank you guys for joining me today and want to thank our audience for listening to today's episode. Don't forget to visit our blogs and subscribe so you can get the latest updates. Ask you guys also to consider subscribing to this podcast via Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. We look forward to our next episode.
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