The United States no longer has a foothold in the digital asset space. President Donald Trump’s administration has made clear that it wants the United States to become the undisputed leader in crypto innovation, financial infrastructure, and blockchain-enabled systems. The executive order on digital financial technology, issued within days of taking office in 2025, was a blueprint, not a signal.
The GENIUS Act backed stablecoins and issued a national cryptocurrency reserve. The crackdown slowed, special forces emerged, and pressure on major exchanges eased.
Ambition is not the problem. The question is what that ambition misses.
It overlooks the asymmetry between the introduction of virtual currencies and the crackdown on financial crime.
It overlooks the widening gulf between policy rhetoric and institutional readiness.
And most of all, it overlooks how thin the talent pool really is.
Cryptocurrency-related financial crimes are no longer speculative. It’s structured. The total value of illicit cryptocurrency activity in 2020 is estimated at $10 billion. By 2025, that amount had increased to more than $154 billion. Growth was not linear. It has increased exponentially. And it happened in parallel to increased surveillance, not in spite of it.
What this suggests is that it is not a compliant sector. This suggests that the surface of the threat is growing faster than the systems that should contain it.
This is not about niche cybercrime. This is now a geostrategic vulnerability.
Chinese laundering networks move tens of millions of dollars in dirty cryptocurrencies a day through a massive wallet ecosystem. Russia has used stablecoins and shell companies to circumvent sanctions. North Korea has funded some of its weapons programs by laundering stolen cryptocurrencies. Even traditional cartels are now using crypto intermediaries to repatriate fentanyl profits.
This is not a hypothesis. This is public record.
But while the threat has matured, enforcement has weakened. The Department of Justice’s Digital Assets Task Force was disbanded in early 2025. Several major enforcement actions have been halted or suspended. And the regulatory stance has changed from cautious to permissive. The assumption seems to be that educational institutions will adapt as necessary.
That assumption deserves scrutiny.
JPMorgan will be able to adapt. The same goes for Bank of America. They have the resources, people, tools and budget flexibility to absorb cryptocurrency exposure without incurring systemic risk. However, most financial institutions do not operate under such conditions. They do not have an in-house cryptocurrency tracking team. They do not have any strategic partnerships with blockchain analysis companies. They don’t have the bench strength to overcome high-speed laundering, stablecoin layering, or decentralized evasion networks.
But these same institutions are now being told, explicitly or implicitly, to participate.
Sanjeev Menon, managing partner at financial crime executive research firm Madison Davis, put it simply:
“Demand for experienced crypto and financial crime professionals is exploding, but there is a limited pool of talent with deep hands-on experience across blockchain tracking, sanctions, AML, and investigations,” Menon said. “The risk of financial crime is growing faster than anyone actually knows how to manage it.”
That may be the most underappreciated reality of this entire policy shift. It’s not that adoption itself is dangerous. That means adoption assumes readiness. And the preparations are not evenly distributed.
As messaging gets stronger, including faster onboarding, greater access to banks, and less oversight, institutions with multibillion-dollar compliance budgets are most likely not the first to make the move. They’re trying to keep up the pace. They are being told that this is the next stage of inclusion and innovation. And they are the ones who absorb the execution risk if things go wrong.
Financial crime is not static. It adapts. And the more digital assets integrate with traditional finance, the more legacy institutions will be on the front lines of risks for which they were not designed and cannot be unilaterally defended.
The intentions behind America’s push for cryptocurrencies are clear. That’s bold. It’s market-driven. But it also presupposes a level of organizational capacity that simply does not exist outside of a very small constituency.
The risk is not that the US accepts cryptocurrencies. The risk is to do so under the illusion that everyone is capable of handling what it entails.
Preparation is not a slogan. It’s a threshold. And we’re not there yet.
Brett Erickson is a managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors. He serves on the advisory boards of the Compliance Research Center at Loyola University Chicago Law School and the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
