Treasury Puts DeFi On Notice as Roman Storm Trial Drags On

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (0:00)
By prosecuting this guy, actually just villainizing this guy that created a great technology or battle tested a great technology, and I think should be treated as more of a hero than a villain, frankly, because we need to have bold people who try these technologies in novel places like the Ethereum blockchain. And once we stop doing that, we're going to stop innovative and stop building the systems that we actually want.

**Kain Warwick** (0:24)
Hey, everyone, I'm Kain Warwick, and welcome to Uneasy Money, because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make this show possible.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (0:34)
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**Kain Warwick** (0:51)
All right. Hey, guys, I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monahan, security expert, and we have a very special guest today, Peter Van Valkenburgh, the executive director of Coin Center. Welcome, Peter.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (1:02)
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah. Thanks.

**Kain Warwick** (1:06)
I think we've got a good show. We were lucky to get you this week because we got lots of interesting things to talk about.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (1:14)
I'm good every week, but I wouldn't be very good at sanctions, you know? That's everyone's thing.

**Kain Warwick** (1:18)
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
All right. Well, let's get into it with the first segment here. So Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, one of the best so far. He's been an exciting Treasury Secretary from my perspective in all kinds of crazy stuff. It's funny. I was catching up on money.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (1:43)
Do you have like US Treasury trading cards?

**Taylor Monahan** (1:46)
Yeah. I wish I did.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (1:48)
I wish I had him with a good Fed share. I want the hollow.

**Kain Warwick** (1:52)
I want the hollow version of Scott Bessent. Or like Scott Bessent, like nuking Iran or whatever. So it's funny. I was catching up on money stuff because I'm like super behind, and so I'll like cherry pick like little ones, and I was reading one from like a year ago around about the tariffs, right? And he's making this joke about how like someone was like, I can't believe that the Treasury Secretary is having these like secret meetings. And, and Matt Levine's like, they always have secret meetings. It's just they don't usually make the economy go up and down every 20 minutes. They're so market moving that like you can trade on it, right? Like usually you talk to the Treasury Secretary, it's like in two over the next two years, things will happen. No, it's like this guy is like, in 20 minutes, we are going to wipe out the Middle East. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty good times, very entertaining. So the Treasury Secretary is threatening economic D-Day on Iran, pushing sanctions on countries and entities that do business with them.
Basically, trying to, you know, full court press on the actual bombs and economic bombs. And, you know, the straight-up form was blockade and all of that stuff.
But I think the most important thing is, as I think many of us in crypto know, Iran had or has or still does have like a pretty big Bitcoin economy, you know, due to currency controls and all kinds of stuff in the country. So there's been, I think, like a number of pretty big Iranian centralized exchanges that have like existed over time and had issues. So Bessent is basically saying, stop doing that. Anyone who's like buying Iranian gold or oil or Bitcoin is going to have some problems. And I think the interesting thing that I saw raised on X was like they left the door open for even DeFi. So, you know, is Uniswap allowed to interact with Iranian people? Is Ethereum allowed to interact with Iranian people? What are the implications of this?
But yeah, it was, it wasn't, it wasn't like they said like DeFi is in trouble or anything like that. But they didn't say that DeFi wasn't in trouble, which, you know, probably should be somewhat concerning. So I don't know, Peter, what's your take?

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (4:47)
Yeah, to just start with the release itself, it's got a lot of heightened rhetoric. It's about economic D-Day.
One doesn't normally announce D-Day before they have a D-Day, but I mean, I get it.

**Taylor Monahan** (5:02)
It's a new era, Peter.

**Peter Van Valkenburgh** (5:03)
It's a new era. Do you want to say that this is going to be significant and uncompromising? I get it. So the release does not call out DeFi, does not call out any particular crypto project, does not mention, say, Uniswap or anything like that. You raise the question. It's a good question, but I want to be clear that the release is fairly neutral. It does say that digital assets and digital asset intermediaries are part of the suite of entities that they're looking at potentially imposing secondary sanctions on.