Regulators Circle Crypto at Consensus Toronto 2025—Will They Choke Innovation or Clean Up the Wild West?

Toronto’s financial elite and crypto rebels collided this week as regulators took center stage at Consensus 2025. From decentralized finance to CBDCs, the battle lines are drawn—and nobody’s playing nice.

SEC drops hammer on ’DeFi 2.0’ projects

Canadian regulators floated surprise stablecoin rules mid-conference, sending USDT trading volumes spiking 30% in under an hour. Meanwhile, SEC Chair’s keynote included not-so-veiled threats about ’algorithmic compliance evasion.’

Bankers in blockchain clothing?

Wall Street’s latest crypto pivot looks suspiciously like old wine in new bottles—Goldman’s ’tokenized carbon credits’ presentation drew more eye-rolls than nods. As one anonymous dev tweeted: ’Same rent-seeking, different distributed ledger.’

The takeaway: Regulation is coming whether crypto likes it or not. The only question is whether it’ll be shaped by innovators or the same suits who brought us 2008.

Monday

• 17:00 UTC (1:00 p.m. ET) The SEC held the latest of its crypto roundtables, this time focused on tokenization.

Wednesday

• CoinDesk’s Consensus Toronto conference started.

Elsewhere:

• (Variety) Warner Bros. Discovery will rebrand its Max streaming service as HBO Max, after previously rebranding HBO Max as Max. Dream job: Person who rebrands stuff?
• (The New York Times) Buyers of the TRUMP memecoin told the Times that they explicitly want to try and influence policy with the president.
• (The New York Times) A company with a handful of employees that makes videos for TikTok said it planned to buy up to $300 million of TRUMP memecoin tokens. It registered zero revenue last year.

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at [email protected] or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

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See ya’ll next week!