I was sitting in a coworking space in Powai, Mumbai, sipping chai and reviewing the economics of a new Layer-2 rollup, when my phone buzzed. It was Priya, a founder I’d mentored since 2020. She runs a cross-border remittance platform for migrant workers in the Gulf. Her voice was tight. “Avery, my legal team just flagged a US bill. It’s about sanctions on Russian energy buyers, but there’s a clause targeting crypto. They’re saying I might need to block all transactions from India if India becomes a top buyer. How do I even do that?”
Priya’s fear isn’t isolated. Over the past seven days, whispers of the “Sanctions to Address Russian Energy Revenue Act” have chilled the atmosphere in Indian crypto circles. The bill, introduced by a bipartisan group of US senators, proposes a 100% tariff on the top five buyers of Russian energy—and, buried in Section 7, a mandate to “enhance oversight of digital assets used to circumvent sanctions.” It’s a seismic shift. Previous actions targeted specific wallets or protocols like Tornado Cash. This bill targets entire economies, and by extension, every blockchain transaction touching those economies.
The bill hasn’t passed. It’s a warning shot. But as someone who has spent nearly three decades in cryptography—from auditing the Telegram Open Network whitepaper in 2017 to co-authoring the Decentralized AI Bill of Rights in 2026—I’ve learned that warnings shots are often the first volley in a war. And this war is not about oil. It’s about the soul of our decentralized dream.
Let me start with a truth that many in our industry avoid: Blockchains are the most traceable financial infrastructure ever built. Every transaction is a permanent, public record. If I want to send value to a sanctioned entity, I’d be better off using cash, gold, or even a prepaid debit card. The idea that crypto is the preferred tool for sanctions evasion is a narrative created by people who don’t understand how chain analysis works—or who want to weaponize that narrative to justify overreach.
This bill exploits that narrative. It doesn’t provide evidence. It doesn’t demand a study. It simply says: “We will review how digital assets are used to avoid sanctions.” The vagueness is the point. It gives the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) a blank check to expand its enforcement toolkit. And what happens when a tool is too blunt? It breaks the very structures it’s meant to protect.
I’ve seen this before. In 2017, when I conducted a forensic audit of the TON whitepaper, I identified a game-theory flaw that would have excluded small holders. I wrote a 40-page critique that reached 50,000 readers across Telegram groups. The project halted—not because of technical failure, but because the incentive design ignored the human element. The same principle applies here. This bill, if passed, will create a compliance nightmare that ignores the reality of how crypto works.
Core Insight: The compliance cost of this bill is mathematically unsustainable.
Consider what it asks: every centralized exchange and possibly every DeFi front-end must screen all transactions from five countries—India, China, Turkey, UAE, and Brazil—against a real-time sanctions list. That’s hundreds of millions of transactions per day. Even with the best machine learning, false positives will block legitimate remittances, scholarships, and medical payments. And for decentralized protocols with no front-end operator? The bill implies that the protocol itself could be held liable—a legal absurdity that would effectively outlaw permissionless innovation.
From code audits to community heartbeats: I learned during the 2020 DeFi Summer, when I founded the Mumbai Chain Guardians, that technology is only as strong as the trust it builds. We translated 50 upgrade proposals into simple Hindi and English guides, preventing panic during the April crash. That trust was built on transparency, not surveillance. This bill would destroy that trust by forcing every crypto interaction into a cage of compliance.
But here’s where the contrarian in me sees a gift wrapped in chains.
Contrarian Angle: This bill may be the push we need to build real bridges—not walls.
The crypto industry has been too passive in its relationship with regulators. We’ve shouted “code is law” from the rooftops, but we’ve rarely sat down to explain that code can also encode ethics. In 2022, during the Terra collapse, I organized weekly resilience calls for 300 female founders. We didn’t talk about price. We talked about community sustainability. That experience taught me that our industry’s greatest vulnerability is not technical—it’s emotional. We fear regulation because we fear losing our identity as rebels. But rebellion without responsibility is just chaos.
Trust is not a protocol, it is a practice. This bill gives us a choice: retreat into the shadows of privacy coins and unregulated mixers, or step into the light of accountable freedom. If we choose the latter, we can engage lawmakers with a better solution: zero-knowledge proofs for compliance. Imagine a system where a user can prove their transaction is not linked to a sanctioned address without revealing the address itself. That is technically possible today. My work on the Decentralized AI Bill of Rights showed me that we can encode moral accountability into consensus. We can build bridges where DeFi once built walls.
Of course, many will say I’m naive. They’ll point to the 100% tariff on energy buyers and argue that this is a geopolitical power play, not a dialog. They’re right. The bill is a hammer. But a hammer can also build if you use it to drive nails into a frame. The frame here is a global regulatory standard for crypto that balances privacy with accountability. We can either let the hammer shatter us, or we can hold it steady and build something worthy of the trust we claim to represent.
Takeaway: The market will react with fear. But fear is a compass, not a destination.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll see panic selling of privacy tokens (XMR, ZEC) and maybe a broader sell-off as the narrative of “crypto equals sanctions evasion” spreads. Exchanges will scramble to update their KYT systems. The bill hasn’t passed yet, but the mere threat will alter the landscape. I’ll be watching for three signals: the legislative text (will it define “digital assets” broadly enough to include DeFi?), exchange statements (which will drop support for risky jurisdictions?), and on-chain data (are sanctioned addresses becoming more active? If yes, the bill’s narrative gains credibility).
But as I told Priya over chai: “Don’t stop building. Just build with your eyes open. This bill isn’t about stopping crypto. It’s about testing whether we can grow up. And I believe we can.”
Because at the end of the day, digital artifacts that remember who we are—our remittances, our art, our identities—are worth protecting. Not by hiding from regulators, but by showing them that trust is earned through practice, not demanded through protocol. That’s the bridge we must build. And it starts with a single, honest conversation.
Building bridges where DeFi once built walls, Avery Moore