A16z, DeFi Group Pitch U.S. SEC on Safe Harbor for DeFi Apps

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By Jesse Hamilton|Edited by Nikhilesh De

Aug 13, 2025, 9:00 a.m.

Crypto investment firm a16z and the DeFi Education Fund are petitioning the Securities and Exchange Commission for reglatory safe harbors for websites and apps used to access DeFi projects.
The SEC is under a new initiative, Project Crypto, to enact friendly policies for the digital assets industry.

Over its years of shepherding its portfolio firms through regulatory waters in the U.S., Andresseen Horowitz (a16z) has made several proposals to keep securities laws off of crypto activity, and a new petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking such protection for decentralized finance (DeFi) websites and mobile applications.

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The request, sent in cooperation with the DeFi Education Fund on Wednesday, follows a surge in DeFi support from the White House and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, encouraging this corner of the crypto sector to move forward without onerous regulatory headwinds. President Donald Trump’s administration produced a recent crypto report that included recommendations to “provide relief for certain DeFi service providers” from broker-dealer registration rules.

“The guiding principle of the safe harbor is that only those apps which do not engender the risks that the Exchange Act’s broker-dealer regulatory regime was designed to address should be eligible; in such cases, registration as a broker under the Exchange Act is unwarranted and inappropriate,” according to the proposal.

In March, a16z sent a lengthy letter to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force outlining the firm’s preferences for safe harbors for network tokens and airdrops, and another proposal asked for an exempt space for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The Andreessen Horowitz crypto arm also has invested in DeFi companies, including Uniswap and Maker.

Trump’s SEC chief, Atkins, has promised to begin taking crypto-friendly actions, even in the absence of the long-awaited congressional legislation to fully establish digital assets regulations in the U.S. — an effort still underway in the Senate, following a recent House vote to approve such a bill. Atkins said his agency is starting “Project Crypto” to get its initiatives underway.

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk’s deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.

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