SEC puts crypto privacy and financial surveillance on its policy agenda

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force on December 5, 2025 announced the agenda and participants for a public roundtable on financial surveillance and privacy, moving a difficult question for digital-asset policy into a formal regulatory forum: how can authorities pursue illicit finance without making every blockchain transaction permanently transparent?

The meeting was scheduled for December 15, 2025, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern at SEC headquarters in Washington. The SEC said it would be open to the public and webcast. The announcement did not propose a rule, grant an exemption or change any compliance obligation. Its significance was institutional: the agency was explicitly treating privacy technology as a policy subject requiring technical input rather than only as an enforcement concern.

Commissioner Hester Peirce, who headed the Crypto Task Force, said new technologies created an opportunity to reconsider financial-surveillance measures while protecting both national interests and individual liberties. That was an attributable policy position, not a Commission finding that any particular privacy protocol complied with federal law.

A technically focused roster

The published agenda divided the substantive program into two 90-minute panels. Opening remarks were assigned to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, Commissioners Mark Uyeda and Peirce, and Crypto Task Force chief of staff Richard Gabbert.

The first panel included representatives associated with Espresso Systems, Zcash, the Aleo Network Foundation, Predicate and SpruceID. A second panel included participants from StarkWare, the Blockchain Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, George Mason University’s law school and Etherealize, alongside specialists in digital identity and financial policy. Yaya Fanusie, then identified by the SEC as an adviser to the Crypto Council for Innovation and policy leader at the Aleo Network Foundation, was listed as moderator.

That mix mattered because “privacy” in crypto covered several distinct issues. Public blockchains could expose transaction histories more broadly than conventional payment systems, while privacy-enhancing protocols could obscure information that regulators, exchanges and law-enforcement agencies expected to use for sanctions screening, anti-money-laundering controls and investigations. Identity credentials and selective-disclosure systems offered another approach: proving a required fact without publishing an entire identity or transaction history.

The December 5 announcement did not endorse any of those designs. The SEC expressly said that inviting a participant did not constitute endorsement of a project, security, issuer, product or service.

Regulation was moving on several tracks

The privacy agenda arrived while U.S. digital-asset policy was broadening beyond enforcement cases. On December 4, 2025, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that listed spot cryptocurrency products would begin trading on CFTC-registered futures exchanges. That separate action illustrated the wider institutional context confronting the SEC: regulators were considering how crypto activity could enter supervised markets while retaining market-integrity and customer-protection controls.

Privacy posed a different challenge from market access. A trading venue could apply familiar surveillance and recordkeeping systems at an identifiable intermediary. A decentralized protocol might operate through public code, self-hosted wallets and participants who did not share a conventional account relationship. The policy question was therefore not simply whether surveillance should exist, but where obligations could practically and lawfully attach.

The SEC had initially scheduled the privacy roundtable for October 17, 2025. A December 1 Sunshine Act notice said it had been postponed because of the lapse in federal appropriations and rescheduled for December 15. That notice also said a majority of commissioners might attend, requiring a public-meeting notice.

As of December 5, 2025, the defensible conclusion was limited but important: privacy-preserving crypto technology had secured a dedicated place in the SEC’s policy process. What the agency would do with the discussion remained unresolved.