6 Questions for JW Verret — the blockchain professor who’s tracking the money
J.W. Verret is a Harvard-educated attorney who teaches corporate finance and accounting at George Mason University. His work has increasingly intersected with the cryptocurrency sector in recent years, as his legion of Twitter followers — who know him as “BlockProf,” or the Blockchain Professor — are poignantly aware.
Aside from his work at GMU, Verret has become known as a vocal advocate for crypto as the top honcho at Crypto Freedom Lab, a think tank fighting devoted to preserving “freedom and privacy for crypto developers and users.” He also serves as a professional legal witness for defendants accused — wrongfully, Verret would argue — of evading financial-tracking laws, and is authoring a book, tentatively titled “Blockchain Privacy and Forensics.” In between, he finds time to serve as a regular columnist for Cointelegraph.
1) You’re very busy professionally — teaching at George Mason University, serving on committees with the Securities and Exchange Commission, going to trials as expert witness. How did life lead you to cryptocurrency?
I spent 15 years as a libertarian regulation/financial person, writing it, think-tanking it in Washington, D.C. For the first 10 years, I lost everything I fought for in the Dodd-Frank era.
The thing with crypto is that it’s been a freedom revolution in finance. It fixes, or aims to fix, problems in finance that government regulation only aims to fix. Regulation entrenches intermediaries where crypto fixes problems by eliminating the need for those intermediaries. And that was very interesting to me.
2) You served on the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, but you’ve also been very vocal in criticizing SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. How was that experience?
It was good. I replaced Hester Peirce when she became an SEC commissioner. I wrote a lot of dissents as a committee member, so I hope I did Hester proud, but I do not think they’ll invite me back in the future under the current chairman. It seems like he’s been trying to just destroy this industry.
He could’ve reached out to the industry to try to make things work, but he has no interest in that, and he’s sued some of the best actors in crypto — Coinbase and Kraken — while ignoring the worst.
3) You’re a vocal proponent of ZCash. Explain your interest there.
Zcash is like Bitcoin, but private. It’a a great invention. Whoever the developers were deserve a Nobel Prize.
I own a lot of Bitcoin. I think it’s a tremendous innovation. But for day-to-day payments, I think we need some privacy, and it’s hard to get that with Bitcoin. I’m also a fan of Monero. which has some pretty good privacy technology. But they’re both pretty good projects — t’s possible to like both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.
Also read: The Supreme Court could stop the SEC’s war on crypto
There are no other privacy tokens that are in the same ballpark. There are some that are really neat innovations, but they’re not at the level you need to have the same privacy. Other projects I’m very excited about are Samourai Wallet and Sparrow Wallet, which offer a bit of privacy for BItcoin transactions.
4) On that note, how do you think the future of crypto is going to be defined? Is it going to be defined as a way to achieve greater privacy in transaction? Will it be defined by efficiency in the sense that it’s easier to use than traditional finance instruments? Will it be defined by crime? Or will it be some mixture of these?
That’s an interesting question. I think it will be some combination of all those things. Crime is often a testing ground for new technology. It certainly was for the internet. In the 1990s, a lot of criminals used the internet. I think the strongest forces in determining what cryptos survive will be some mixture of efficiency and scale, but I think privacy will be a part of it. As governments and big corporations fight back against trustless, disintermediated property transfers, the only way to protect yourself will be through the use of privacy coins and privacy protocols.
5) You’re also serving as a professional witness in U.S. v. Sterlingov, where the U.S. government is charging 33-year-old Roman Sterlingov with developing Bitcoin Fog — a crypto mixer. The FBI arrested him at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) in 2021, and they’re accusing him [Bitcoin Fog] of laundering $336 million. Tell me about that.
I spend a lot of time as a forensic accountant, but I’m also into privacy. Some people think that’s a conflict: How can you be privacy while also following the money? But I don’t see that as a conflict at all. Some of the people most into privacy who I know are forensic investigators. I’m a believer in public information. People should learn what it takes to be private. The worst people tend not to be smart anyway — they make mistakes, and they don’t use privacy tools optimally.
In terms of U.S. v. Sterlingov, I’m providing some expert help in forensic accounting and money laundering. It’s been helpful to merge my legal and accounting perspectives to aid the legal team. I also do some work helping customers of large crypto exchanges when their crypto is frozen, and we ultimately resolve it when we figure out that the customer did nothing wrong — but were falsely flagged by crypto tracing tools.
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False positives in crypto tracing can have a real cost and that is one thing that concerns me about the dominance of some of the tracing firms. TRM and Ciphertrace seem like they try to get things right — and don’t overclaim their tracing capabilities — but that’s not true of every firm in this industry.
6) I hear you have opinions about UFOs. Can you tell us what you know?
I’m really into podcasts about the history of investigations into UFOs. Some good ones are “Strange Arrivals” and “High Strange.” I’d also recommend reading J. Allen Hynek’s “The Hynek UFO Report,” which is about the Project BLUE BOOK Report. He was a physics professor at a little school [Ohio State] and the Air Force asked him to look into it one day. I think they thought he’d be a front man — and he was, but then he changed.
The government knows no more now than it did 50 years ago. They may know more than they’ve shared, but I don’t think they understand it. The Navy pilot revelations are pretty amazing. So I think they do exist. I think they’re probably probes of some kind that are unmanned — nothing armageddon or conspiracy. I just think they want to see what we’re up to.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its annual report detailing complaints and losses due to scams and fraud involving cryptocurrency in 2024.
According to the report released on April 23, the IC3 received more than 140,000 complaints referencing cryptocurrency in 2024, resulting in roughly $9.3 billion in losses. The bureau reported that individuals over the age of 60 had been the most affected by crypto-related fraud, with roughly 33,000 complaints and $2.8 billion in losses.
“Last year saw a new record for losses reported to IC3, totaling a staggering $16.6 billion,” said the report. “Fraud represented the bulk of reported losses in 2024, and ransomware was again the most pervasive threat to critical infrastructure, with complaints rising 9% from 2023,” notes the report, adding that, as a group, those over the age of 60 suffered the most losses and submitted the most complaints.
The report added that the resultant losses had increased roughly 66% since 2023, from roughly $5.6 billion to $9.3 billion. The most significant percentage of losses occurred due to crypto investment schemes, while the largest number of complaints related to “sextortion” schemes, in which fraudsters manipulated photos and videos to create explicit content. Other scams included schemes involving the use of crypto ATMs or kiosks.
Related: Crypto scam uses trade war fears to lure victims, Canadian watchdogs warn
In February, the FBI reported its “Operation Level Up” had saved potential victims of crypto fraud roughly $285 million between January 2024 and January 2025. However, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis speculated that 2025 could see the largest number of scams to date, given that generative AI is making the practice “more scalable and affordable for bad actors to conduct.”
Globally, Chainalysis estimated that there had been roughly $41 billion in illicit crypto volume in 2024, with roughly 25% of the funds involved with “hacking, extortion, trafficking, or scams.” Some of the most high-profile crimes included the $1.4 billion in crypto stolen from the Bybit exchange in March and North Korean hackers taking more than $1.3 billion.
Magazine: Trump’s crypto ventures raise conflict of interest, insider trading questions
United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently called for “Bretton Woods institutions,” such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to reorient themselves, a signal that the global monetary order could be shifting.
Speaking at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) on April 23, Bessent called on the IMF and the World Bank to correct trade imbalances and protect the value of fiat currencies against exchange rate risk.
“The Bretton Woods institutions must step back from their sprawling and unfocused agendas,” Bessent said. He added:
“The IMF’s mission is to promote international monetary cooperation, facilitate the balanced growth of international trade, encourage economic growth, and discourage harmful policies like competitive exchange rate depreciation.”
Bessent’s call for the IMF to correct trade imbalances between countries, specifically the US and China, coincides with a decline in the US dollar to three-year lows, $36 trillion in US government debt, and stiff economic competition from China.
Investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio argues that the world is experiencing a global macroeconomic shift that will upend the post-WWII financial order and eventually replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency, potentially with a digital form of money.
Related: Trump tariffs reignite idea that Bitcoin could outlast US dollar
The Bretton Woods Agreement
The Bretton Woods Agreement was signed in 1944 and pegged the currencies of 44 countries to the value of the US dollar, which, at that point, was pegged to the value of gold at $35 per ounce.
Eliminating complex foreign exchange risks between freely floating currencies to make global trade more efficient was the primary goal of the agreement.
In August 1971, US President Richard Nixon announced the end of the dollar’s convertibility to gold — formally ending the Bretton Woods agreement in a move that was supposed to be temporary.
“Your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it does today,” Nixon incorrectly told Americans during his now-infamous address.
The IMF and the World Bank, which were spawned from the Bretton Woods agreement, continue operating in an attempt to curb the effects of free-floating fiat currencies on the foreign exchange market.
Bessent eyes stablecoins to protect the US dollar, BTC advocates have another idea
Speaking at the White House Digital Asset Summit on March 7, Bessent said stablecoins could drive international demand for US dollars and US government debt instruments.
Bessent added that the Trump administration will use stablecoins to protect the US dollar and its status as the global reserve currency.
Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser argued against this plan, predicting that gold-backed stablecoins would outcompete dollar-pegged tokens due to the desire for low-volatility, inflation-resistant money.
In March this year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote that the $36 trillion US national debt could drive investors to Bitcoin (BTC) as market participants start to see BTC as a better store of value than the US dollar.
Bitwise executive Jeff Park voiced a similar prediction in February, focused on the effects of US President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
The analyst wrote that the tumult from the ongoing trade war would cause worldwide inflation, which would cause individuals to seek alternative stores of value like Bitcoin, driving its price much higher in the long term.
Magazine: Bitcoin payments are being undermined by centralized stablecoins
The Alabama Securities Commission, a financial regulator for the US state, dropped its lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase, which accused the company of violating securities laws by offering staking services to clients.
The regulator cited the ongoing work between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the crypto industry to develop clear crypto regulations as the primary reason for dropping the litigation, according to the April 23 legal filing shared by Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal.
The filing read:
“The SEC has announced the formation of a new task force to, among other things, provide guidance for the promulgation of rules regarding the regulation of cryptocurrency products and services.”
“Due to the foregoing, the Commission believes it would be apt to allow policymakers time to consider regulatory constructs,” the filing continued.
The Alabama Securities Commission filed its lawsuit against Coinbase in June 2023, alongside state regulators from California, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The Commission’s dropped lawsuit reflects the positive regulatory shift toward cryptocurrencies in the United States as reform at the federal level matriculates into state-level regulatory policy.
Related: Oregon targets Coinbase after SEC drops its federal lawsuit
US states drop Coinbase lawsuit but half still holding out
Five of the 10 states that filed the litigation against Coinbase for its staking services have dropped their lawsuits.
On March 13, Vermont’s Department of Financial Regulation became the first of the 10 state regulators to drop the staking lawsuit against Coinbase.
South Carolina’s securities watchdog was the next to drop the 2023 litigation against Coinbase, dismissing the lawsuit on March 28.
Grewal announced that Kentucky’s Department of Financial Institutions followed Vermont and South Carolina’s lead on April 1 by also dismissing its Coinbase lawsuit.
Despite the domino effect of states rescinding litigation against the crypto exchange, the Coinbase chief legal officer said that more work needs to be done.
“Five holdouts are still electing to waste taxpayer resources on lawsuits, and four of those have banned staking with Coinbase, depriving consumers of the right to earn on their platform of choice,” Grewal wrote in an April 23 X post.
Magazine: SEC’s U-turn on crypto leaves key questions unanswered
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