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A new report from the Wall Street bank, cited Monday (Jan. 5) by CoinDesk, offers a positive outlook for the industry, especially for infrastructure companies that support the crypto ecosystem but aren’t as exposed to market fluctuations.
“We see the improving regulatory backdrop as a key driver to continued institutional crypto adoption, especially for buyside and sellside financial firms, as well as new use cases for crypto developing beyond trading,” analysts led by James Yaro wrote, per CoinDesk.
The report added that pending U.S. market structure legislation could be a major catalyst. These include bills that would clarify how tokenized assets and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects are regulated, and delineate the roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in crypto regulation.
Passage of these bills during the first half of the year would be particularly meaningful, Goldman added, considering that the midterm elections in November could hinder progress.
The bank also cited its own survey data showing that 35% of institutions say that regulatory uncertainty is the biggest hurdle to adoption, while 32% view regulatory clarity as the number one catalyst, CoinDesk added.
As PYMNTS wrote last week, the crypto sector’s early growth depended in part on regulatory ambiguity, letting users experiment without many of traditional finance’s guardrails.
“This environment produced extraordinary innovation, but also spectacular failures, from exchange collapses and stablecoin de-peggings to frauds that cost retail users billions of dollars,” PYMNTS wrote. “For crypto firms, the operational implications of the growing compliance-first pivot are significant. Compliance teams must scale. Data systems must mature. Jurisdictional differences must be navigated with care.”
For smaller players, the cost of doing business will rise, but so too will entry barriers, which may also keep out “fly-by-night operators” that have long stained the industry’s reputation, PYMNTS added. And this recalibration is especially significant when looked at alongside the enforcement statistics that marked 2025.
The SEC for example, brought more than 30 crypto-related enforcement actions, resulting in $2.6 billion in penalties and restitution — the highest total ever for the industry, while the CFTC brought in more than $17 billion.
“From the point of view of compliant cryptocurrency firms, the year’s worth of enforcement actions and criminal cases signal the SEC and CFTC’s increasing emphasis on clear-cut fraud and criminality, rather than debates over whether digital assets deserve security or commodity designations,” the report added.
