The US has doled out more than $3.3 billion in penalties for crypto firms

US regulators have collected $3.3 billion worth of monetary penalties from crypto-related businesses since 2009, government data show — and have collected $179.7 million so far in 2022.

That’s according to a new report from Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, whose findings illustrate the breakdown of more than 130 crypto enforcement actions initiated by government agencies since 2009.

The report shows that the largest single action of 2022 was initiated against lending platform BlockFi, which agreed to pay $100 million in April for failure to register its lending project. The largest action overall was a $1.2 billion settlement in 2020 against the Telegram Group Inc. for offering to sell unregistered digital “Gram” tokens.

The data also revealed that more than 70% of all monetary penalties collected to date stem from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which recently announced that cryptoassets and emerging technologies would be two of its top priorities for 2022. In May, the SEC stated that it would be nearly doubling the size of its Cryptoassets and Cyber Unit.

Although the US remains by far the largest initiator of crypto-related enforcement actions to date — collecting over 98% of all crypto-related monetary penalties globally — the report shows that other jurisdictions are beginning to ramp up their enforcement efforts, including Nigeria, Turkey, India and Ontario, Canada.

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