Trump signed repeal of the IRS DeFi broker reporting rule

President Donald Trump signed Public Law 119-5 on April 10, 2025, nullifying an Internal Revenue Service rule that would have treated certain decentralized-finance trading front-end providers as brokers for federal information-reporting purposes.

The one-sentence joint resolution, previously designated H.J.Res. 25, used the Congressional Review Act to disapprove Treasury Decision 10021. The official statute records April 10, 2025, as its approval date and declares that the targeted rule has no force or effect.

The development mattered beyond the removal of one reporting requirement. Congressional Review Act disapproval also restricts an agency from reissuing the rule in substantially the same form unless Congress later authorizes it. That raised the institutional stakes by shifting the next move on comparable DeFi reporting requirements back toward Congress rather than leaving Treasury and the IRS free simply to reproduce the December 2024 framework.

What the repealed rule covered

Treasury and the IRS published Treasury Decision 10021 in the Federal Register on December 30, 2024. The rule focused on people who, in the ordinary course of business, stood ready to provide trading front-end services capable of effectuating digital-asset sales.

Under the agency’s formulation, a front-end provider could be treated as a broker when its service arrangement ordinarily placed it in a position to know the nature of a customer’s transaction. Covered providers would have been required to file information returns and furnish customer statements reporting gross proceeds from specified digital-asset sales.

The regulations became effective on February 28, 2025, but their principal reporting requirement applied to sales effected on or after January 1, 2027. The April 10 repeal therefore arrived before that transaction-reporting window began.

The rule did not treat every participant touching decentralized software as a broker. Its analysis distinguished covered front-end services from activities such as providing validation services or software whose sole function was to let users control private keys. The boundary nevertheless drew industry objections because DeFi applications can separate interface operation, smart-contract execution, custody and transaction settlement among different actors.

What changed—and what did not

Public Law 119-5 removed Treasury Decision 10021’s reporting framework. It did not erase taxpayers’ underlying obligation to report taxable income or gains from digital-asset transactions. It also did not repeal the separate reporting rules finalized in Treasury Decision 10000 for custodial trading platforms, certain hosted-wallet providers, digital-asset kiosks and other covered intermediaries.

That distinction is central to the event-day record: Congress rejected a particular attempt to apply broker reporting to specified noncustodial front-end providers, not federal taxation of cryptocurrency and not every Form 1099-DA requirement.

The Congressional Budget Office’s March 7, 2025 cost estimate projected that H.J.Res. 25 would reduce federal revenue by $4.5 billion over fiscal years 2025 through 2035. CBO attributed the estimate mainly to reduced third-party reporting for taxable cryptocurrency transactions. It also identified significant uncertainty around baseline projections and taxpayer responses. The figure was a forward-looking budget estimate, not an observed loss, market valuation or measurement of DeFi activity.

Institutional significance and limits

The enactment converted a crypto-industry policy objective into binding federal law. It also demonstrated that Congress could use expedited review procedures to reverse a recently finalized digital-asset regulation.

The evidence supports the legal event and its immediate scope, but not broader claims that DeFi had become unregulated or exempt from taxation on April 10, 2025. Other federal and state laws, enforcement authorities and reporting rules remained relevant. Nor does the record establish that the repeal caused any particular token-price movement; this reconstruction makes no market-causation claim and uses no price window.