The United States is no longer dipping its toes into the digital asset space. It’s diving in. President Donald Trump’s administration has made clear that it wants the U.S. to become the undisputed leader in crypto innovation, financial infrastructure and blockchain-enabled systems. His executive order on digital financial technology, issued within days of taking office in 2025, wasn’t a signal, it was a blueprint.
It backed stablecoins with the GENIUS Act, and floated a national crypto reserve. Enforcement slowed, task forces appeared and pressure on major exchanges eased.
The ambition isn’t the issue. The problem is what that ambition overlooks.
It overlooks the asymmetry between crypto adoption and financial crime enforcement.
It overlooks the widening gulf between policy rhetoric and institutional readiness.
And most of all, it overlooks how thin the talent pool actually is.
Crypto-related financial crime is no longer speculative. It is structured. In 2020, the total volume of illicit crypto activity was estimated at $10 billion. By 2025, that number had grown to more than $154 billion. The growth has not been linear. It has been exponential. And it has occurred in parallel with increased scrutiny, not in spite of it.
What that suggests is not a sector being brought into compliance. It suggests a threat surface expanding faster than the systems meant to contain it.
This isn’t about niche cybercrime. This is now a geostrategic vulnerability.
Chinese laundering networks are moving tens of millions of dollars in dirty crypto per day through high-volume wallet ecosystems. Russia has used stablecoins and shell firms to evade sanctions. North Korea has funded portions of its weapons development program by laundering stolen crypto. Even traditional cartels are now leveraging crypto intermediaries to repatriate fentanyl profits.
This isn’t hypothetical. This is public record.
And yet, even as the threat has matured, the enforcement posture has weakened. The Justice Department’s digital assets task force was disbanded in early 2025. Several major enforcement actions were dropped or suspended. And the regulatory posture has shifted from caution to permissiveness. The assumption seems to be that institutions will adapt as needed.
That assumption deserves scrutiny.
JPMorgan can adapt. So can Bank of America. They have the resources, the staffing, the tooling and the budget flexibility to absorb crypto exposure without inviting systemic risk. But most financial institutions don’t operate on those terms. They don’t have crypto tracing teams in-house. They don’t have strategic partnerships with blockchain analytics firms. They don’t have the bench strength to navigate high-velocity laundering, stablecoin layering, or decentralized evasion networks.
And yet, these are the same institutions now being told, explicitly or implicitly, to get on board.
Sanjeev Menon, managing partner at Madison-Davis, a financial crime executive search firm, put it simply.
“Demand for experienced crypto and financial crime professionals has exploded, but there are only so many people with deep, hands-on experience across blockchain tracing, sanctions, AML [anti-money laundering] and investigations,” Menon said. “Financial crime risk is scaling faster than the availability of people who actually know how to manage it.”
That may be the most underappreciated reality in this entire policy shift. It’s not that adoption itself is dangerous. It’s that adoption assumes readiness. And readiness is not distributed evenly.
As messaging ramps up—faster onboarding, broader banking access, lighter oversight—the institutions most likely to move first are not the ones with billion-dollar compliance budgets. They’re the ones trying to keep pace. They’re the ones being told this is the next phase of inclusion and innovation. And they’re the ones who will absorb the enforcement risk when things go wrong.
Financial crime isn’t static. It adapts. And the more digital assets integrate with traditional finance, the more legacy institutions will find themselves on the frontlines of a risk they didn’t design for and can’t unilaterally defend against.
The intent behind America’s crypto push is clear. It’s bold. It’s market-driven. But it also assumes a level of institutional capacity that, outside of a very small tier, is simply not there.
The risk isn’t that the U.S. embraces crypto. The risk is that it does so under the illusion that everyone is equipped to handle what comes with it.
Readiness is not a slogan. It’s a threshold. And we’re not there yet.
Brett Erickson is the managing principal of Obsidian Risk Advisors. He serves on the advisory boards of Loyola University Chicago School of Law's Center for Compliance Studies and DePaul University Driehaus College of Business.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
