The DeFi Education Fund (DEF) and 35 co-signatories, including a16z crypto, Aptos Labs, Uniswap, Chainlink, Paradigm, Solana Policy Institute, and Phantom, among others, have petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to convert its recent staff guidance on DeFi interfaces into durable notice and comment rules.
In another development, Ethereum developer Tom Lehman published a draft proposal, EIP-8182, on X. The proposal calls for integrating native private transfers into the Ethereum protocol.
Both events will likely impact how SEC regulations match the pace of innovation in the crypto space.
What did the April SEC guidance say about DeFi interfaces?
The SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets has a statement from the staff on April 13, certain crypto trading interface operators will be exempt from registering as broker-dealers.
The exemption covered operators of front-end interfaces that connect to DeFi protocols through which users manage their own funds.
The guidelines allow covered UI providers to receive transaction-based compensation from users without having to register as a broker-dealer.
Why are DeFi stakeholders pushing for formal regulations now?
The SEC’s April 13 guidance is an interim staff statement that will be considered withdrawn five years after the date of publication unless the Commission determines otherwise or makes it a rule.
The DEF and its co-signatories are asking the Atkins SEC to codify that position through formal rulemaking so that it cannot be overturned by a future committee with different policy priorities. Anyone who experienced the SEC under Gary Gensler would understand the urgency to implement formal rules.
The signatories warned that regulatory uncertainty could hinder blockchain development and limit market access for investors.
How does Ethereum’s own privacy architecture complicate current guidelines?
If the EIP-8182 draft proposal is adopted, private transfers would become a native feature of Ethereum itself.
The proposal would add a shared shielded pool directly to Ethereum as a system contract, with ZK proof verification precompiled.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has previously walked this path in April 2025. At the time, Vitalik suggested that wallets should integrate privacy tools like Railgun so that users could manage shielded balances without adding third-party tools.
The pool proposed in EIP-8182 would contain no administrative key, no governance token, and no on-chain upgrade mechanism. It would simply evolve through Ethereum’s hard-fork process.
As the Ethereum network considers this proposal, there is also the perspective of how native privacy at the protocol level would impact the category of non-custodial interfaces that the Commission has just attempted to define.
A ring-fenced pool built into Ethereum would make it relatively harder for future regulators to draw broker-dealer lines around front-end wallets that offer private transfers as a standard feature.