Regulatory shake-ups for digital assets continued into and throughout 2025, with newly enacted legislation and anticipated policy shifts in hopes of encouraging innovation and confidence in the digital asset space. Bits of Blocks ( Bob ) has been on the beat, delivering breaking news on legal developments affecting the blockchain and crypto industry. To celebrate, we present the '12 Days of Bobmas' – a chronological journey through our top stories of the year.   To Dystopia a

The Australian Government has taken a significant step toward regulating digital asset platforms under the Australian Financial Services Licensing ( AFSL ) regime, with draft legislation set for its second reading in Parliament. This swift move follows public consultations with industry on exposure draft legislation which were completed on 24 October 2025 . Feedback during the consultation period was broadly supportive, though concerns remain about compliance costs, definitio

In a recent speech, the Securities and Exchanges Commission ( SEC ) Chairman, Paul Atkins, tackled one of the most vexed issues in relation to cryptocurrency, the application of the US securities laws. The speech shed more light on ‘Project Crypto’, the commission's flagship initiative to drive America’s digital finance revolution. The SEC Chairman announced earlier this year plans to facilitate US financial markets to move on-chain and renewed his call to embrace market inn

The Cayman Islands, with a secure British legal system, safe business environment and tax neutral status, has long been a favoured home to US Hedge funds (35,000+) and crypto companies, and new data from the Cayman Islands General Registry underscores just how much that growth has continued. In 2017, the Cayman Islands legislated into existence the Cayman Foundation in the Foundation Companies Act , a highly flexible corporate structure which could operate to manage wealth an

The US continues to drive forward in crypto, with the powerful Commodities, Futures Trading Commission ( CFTC ), which has often been seen in competition with the Securities Exchanges Commission ( SEC ), moving to announce a digital asset pilot program and updated guidance under which tokenised assets will be approved for use as collateral for derivatives in regulated US markets and "outdated" requirements removed . The move could see a variety of tokenised assets used incr

Ethereum upgrades have always been a mix of spectacle and subtlety—Dencun's blobs reshaped Layer 2 economics overnight, Pectra's account tweaks whispered promises of smoother user experiences. But the latest fork: Fusaka, activated on December 3, 2025, at epoch 411,392 (around 21:50 UTC), was more of an under-the-hood upgrade that will have broader and longer impacts. Named after a cosmic nod—"Fulu" for the consensus layer's starry precision, "Osaka" for the Devcon 2025 host

Uniswap, one of the largest decentralised exchanges has announced a proposal to activate its long-debated fee switch . The proposal would see the protocol begin collecting fees and introduce a programmatic mechanism that enable users paid to burn UNI governance tokens . How will the fee switch work? The fee switch is a mechanism built into Uniswap’s protocol that allows governance to redirect a share of trading fees from liquidity providers to UNI token holders. Until now, t

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted recently to approve proposed rule changes by three national securities exchanges, enabling them to adopt generic listing standards for new cryptocurrency and other spot commodity ETFs. This means exchanges can now list and trade Commodity-Based Trust Shares that meet these standards without needing to submit individual proposed rule changes to the Commission under Section 19(b) of the Securities Exchange Act . This appro

The European Union is proposing a significant regulatory shift that could reshape how cryptocurrency firms and exchanges operate across the region. The European Securities and Markets Authority ( ESMA ) is drafting plans to transfer supervisory powers from national regulators to ESMA in an attempt to unify oversight. Verena Ross, chair of ESMA, told the Financial Times  that this transfer aims to: “ensure that we are addressing the continued fragmentation in markets and resol