It is often said that crypto is part technology and part religion. As such, it is hardly surprising that the unfolding regulatory overhaul has been accompanied both by vigorous soul searching related to the state of crypto’s (often anti-establishment) core values and palpable excitement over potential new use cases.

With the blessing of CoinDesk, I asked the panelists of our upcoming people’s regulatory roundtable at Consensus 2025—each of them crypto veterans and advocates for sensible regulation—about safeguarding crypto values in regulatory reform and about the innovation that new regulation is making possible.

You can catch Kayvan Sadeghi, Connor Spelliscy, Lewis Cohen, Michelle Ann Gitlitz and David Adlerstein speaking at the People’s Regulatory Roundtable on May 14 at 10 a.m. on the Spotlight Stage. The roundtable will be moderated by Ivo Entchev. If you would like to submit a question ahead of time, please email it to opinion@coindesk.com.

This is what they had to say.

Which core crypto values are most important to you and why? How can we ensure that they are respected by regulatory reform?

KAYVAN: Individual freedom and sovereignty are core values. Privacy and decentralization are important largely as a means to achieving that sovereignty, which can otherwise be undermined through surveillance and centralized points of control.

To ensure that these values are respected, it is helpful to reframe the conversation to focus on the ways in which new technology can achieve the objectives of the existing laws, not just differently, but better. For example, many financial regulations are designed to prevent abuse by those with control over other people’s assets. But as long as humans hold that power, the risk of corruption and greed will persist and the same problems will recur.

Heavily regulated intermediaries is one path, but removing the human intermediaries altogether can eliminate the root cause. By analogy, one can curtail drunk-driving with stricter alcohol laws and more frequent roadside checkpoints, but those are band-aids on a problem that can be eliminated with autonomous vehicles.

There will be growing pains as new technology is battle-tested, and the risks will look different from the risks of human intermediaries, but the values can be preserved by focusing the discussion around the use of technology to deliver better solutions to problems that the law is already trying to solve.

CONNOR: Blockchain technology can provide users with unprecedented levels of transparency, reliability, and security—as long as policy frameworks allow it to flourish by incentivizing decentralization.

If properly regulated, blockchain projects will continue to decentralize, giving users greater control over their finances and digital assets, reducing reliance on overreaching institutions. Beyond financial use cases, decentralized blockchain networks function as........

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