DeFi Stakeholders Petition SEC to Formalize Interface Guidance as Ethereum Proposes Native Privacy Layer

Gate News message, April 24 — The DeFi Education Fund (DEF) and 35 co-signatories, including a16z crypto, Aptos Labs, Uniswap, Chainlink, Paradigm, Solana Policy Institute, and Phantom, have petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to convert its recent staff guidance on DeFi interfaces into formal notice-and-comment rulemaking. Concurrently, Ethereum developer Tom Lehman published draft proposal EIP-8182, which calls for native private transfers to be embedded directly into the Ethereum protocol.

On April 13, the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets issued a staff statement exempting certain crypto trading interface operators from broker-dealer registration. The exemption covers operators of front-end interfaces connecting to DeFi protocols where users control their own funds, permitting covered UI providers to receive transaction-based compensation without registration.

The DEF and co-signatories are seeking to lock down this position through formal rulemaking to prevent it from being reversed by a future SEC with different policy priorities. The interim staff statement is set to expire after five years unless the Commission converts it into a rule. The signatories warned that regulatory ambiguity could hinder blockchain development and limit investor market access.

EIP-8182 proposes adding a shared shielded pool directly into Ethereum as a system contract with zero-knowledge proof verification. The pool would have no admin key, governance token, or on-chain upgrade mechanism, evolving only through Ethereum’s hard-fork process. If adopted, native protocol-level privacy could complicate the SEC’s ability to draw regulatory lines around non-custodial interfaces offering private transfers as a default feature.