Coin Center: Crypto's First Amendment Defender and Privacy Advocate in Washington

There is a difference between defending crypto and defending principles that happen to apply to crypto. The Blockchain Association defends crypto — specifically, the business models of the exchanges, protocols, and technology companies that pay its membership fees. Coin Center defends principles: the right to financial privacy, the First Amendment status of code as protected speech, the constitutional limits on government surveillance of financial transactions. The organisations’ policy conclusions frequently overlap, but the reasoning is fundamentally different, and the difference matters.

Coin Center’s principled stance — nonprofit structure, non-lobbying designation, policy positions derived from constitutional and civil liberties frameworks rather than commercial interests — gives it a credibility in regulatory and legislative discussions that industry lobbies cannot purchase. When Coin Center argues that a proposed surveillance rule raises First Amendment concerns, the argument comes without the obvious self-interest that attaches to the same argument from Coinbase or the Blockchain Association. That credibility is Coin Center’s most valuable asset, and it is the product of a deliberate organisational model.

Jerry Brito’s Leadership

Jerry Brito has led Coin Center as Executive Director since its founding in 2014. His background — academic work in law and policy, previous research at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center — gave him the policy research credentials and the DC engagement skills that the organisation needed. But his significance to Coin Center is not primarily organisational; it is intellectual.

Brito has been the most consistent and rigorous advocate for the civil liberties dimensions of crypto regulation in Washington over the past decade. His public writing, congressional testimony, and regulatory comment letters have developed the legal and constitutional arguments for financial privacy, the free speech status of cryptographic code, and the limits of government surveillance authority over financial transactions. These arguments are not unique to Brito, but he has articulated them with unusual precision and persistence in the specific institutional contexts — congressional committees, regulatory agencies, federal courts — where they shape outcomes.

His testimony before congressional committees, spanning more than a decade, provides one of the most complete public records of how the civil liberties arguments in crypto policy have developed. Tracking Brito’s congressional testimony across that period is, in effect, tracking the intellectual development of the privacy and First Amendment case for crypto policy.

The Financial Privacy Campaign

Coin Center’s most sustained policy campaign has been the fight against proposed regulations that would extend financial surveillance to crypto transactions in ways that the organisation argues exceed constitutional authority and undermine legitimate privacy interests.

The most prominent battle was the campaign against FinCEN’s proposed rule on unhosted wallets — a regulation that would have required cryptocurrency exchanges to collect identifying information about the counterparties of customers using non-custodial (unhosted) wallets. Coin Center’s opposition went beyond the industry argument that the rule was technically impractical; it argued that the rule raised serious Fourth Amendment concerns about the scope of the government’s authority to collect financial information without a warrant.

This distinction — privacy rights argument vs. practical burdens argument — is precisely what makes Coin Center’s contribution distinctive. The Blockchain Association also opposed the unhosted wallet rule, but primarily on grounds of compliance burden and competitive impact on US firms. Coin Center’s Fourth Amendment argument engaged the underlying constitutional question about government surveillance authority. The constitutional argument was harder for Treasury to dismiss as mere industry resistance, and it influenced the final disposition of the rule.

The Tornado Cash First Amendment Battle

The most consequential Coin Center campaign — and the clearest expression of its principled approach — has been its challenge to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions against Tornado Cash, imposed in August 2022.

Tornado Cash is a smart contract protocol that functions as a cryptocurrency mixer, allowing users to obscure the transaction history of their funds. OFAC designated Tornado Cash itself — the smart contract code, not just specific individuals associated with it — as a sanctions target, effectively making it illegal for US persons to interact with the protocol.

Coin Center’s response was to frame the sanctions as a First Amendment violation: the smart contract code is software, software is speech, and sanctioning the code itself — rather than individuals who misuse it — is a form of government censorship of protected expression. Coin Center filed a lawsuit challenging the sanctions, not on behalf of industry clients with financial interests in the outcome, but as a matter of constitutional principle.

The legal argument is genuinely contested — courts have split on whether smart contract code constitutes protected speech for First Amendment purposes — but Coin Center’s framing shifted the public discussion of the Tornado Cash sanctions from purely a sanctions enforcement question to a civil liberties question. That shift brought privacy advocates, academic First Amendment scholars, and civil liberties organisations into a debate that would otherwise have been entirely within the crypto policy specialist community.

The broader implication of the Tornado Cash challenge is significant for tokenization policy: if software code is protected speech, then regulatory requirements that effectively compel the modification of software — by requiring smart contracts to include compliance functionality — raise First Amendment concerns that regulators must address in their legal reasoning.

Comparison with the Blockchain Association

The contrast with the Blockchain Association is instructive for understanding the landscape of crypto policy advocacy. Both organisations oppose overreaching regulation. Both engage with Congress, regulatory agencies, and courts. But the differences in approach produce different kinds of influence.

The Blockchain Association’s litigation is strategic — designed to win specific cases that change the regulatory environment for its members’ businesses. Coin Center’s litigation is principled — designed to establish constitutional limits on government power that protect all users of cryptocurrency, including users whose activities have no commercial dimension. The Blockchain Association’s lobbying is directed by member interests; Coin Center’s policy positions are determined by its own research staff’s assessment of the relevant legal principles.

This means Coin Center sometimes takes positions that are uncomfortable for the industry. On privacy-preserving technologies, on financial surveillance, and on the limits of government monitoring authority, Coin Center’s positions align with civil libertarians and privacy advocates in ways that put it in coalition with groups the industry does not always want to be associated with. That willingness to follow principles regardless of industry comfort is precisely what generates the credibility that makes Coin Center’s voice valuable in legislative and regulatory discussions.

Why Non-Commercial Advocacy Matters

In any regulatory debate, the interests of commercial parties are well-represented — they have the resources and the incentives to engage intensively. What is structurally underrepresented are the interests of individuals as users, as citizens with constitutional rights, and as participants in a broader social order that values privacy and freedom from surveillance.

Coin Center exists to represent those interests in the specific context of crypto regulation. This is not a function that industry lobbies can perform credibly, because their ultimate accountability is to commercial interests, not constitutional principles. Congressional staff and federal judges who need to understand the civil liberties dimensions of crypto regulation have, in Coin Center, an organisation they can cite and engage with whose credibility does not depend on financial interest in the outcome.

That function — principled, credible, non-commercial — is rare and genuinely valuable in policy debates that are otherwise heavily dominated by well-funded industry advocates.