Crypto Regulation — Laws, Taxes & Compliance

Every financial technology eventually meets the law — usually later than its builders expected, and usually

with more friction than its users hoped for. Crypto-assets are no exception. What began as an explicitly anti-

regulatory project has, over a decade and a half, collided repeatedly with securities law, tax law, banking law,

and criminal law — and in that collision, an entirely new field of regulatory practice has been built from

scratch, in public, often in real time.

This book is a guided tour of that field: how regulation evolved from total absence to global coordination, how

digital assets get legally classified and why it matters so much which label they receive, how taxation actually

works across the many ways crypto can generate income, how anti-money laundering and know-your-

customer rules apply to pseudonymous networks, how securities and derivatives regulators have staked

competing claims over the same assets, what institutions must build to operate compliantly, how the rules

differ sharply across major jurisdictions, what legal risk and enforcement actually look like in practice, how

corporate and DAO governance intersect with existing law, how decentralised protocols are regulated at their

edges, how an entire global compliance and RegTech industry has grown around all of it, and where this field

is likely headed over the next decade.