Big four accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCooper (PwC) has decided to ditch the more cautious stance it has maintained towards digital assets up to now and “lean in” to the sector, following legislative progress and a shift away from hardline regulation since last January’s inauguration of United States President Donald Trump, according to a report by the Financial Times.
In a January 4 interview with the FT, Paul Griggs, U.S. Senior Partner and CEO of PwC, said the firm underwent a strategic reversal on digital assets last year as a result of the U.S. administration appointing pro-digital currency regulators and Congress passing new laws governing digital assets, namely stablecoins.
“The Genius Act and the regulatory rulemaking around stablecoin I expect will create more conviction around leaning into that product and that asset class,” Griggs told the FT. “The tokenisation of things will certainly continue to evolve as well. PwC has to be in that ecosystem.”
According to the FT report, up until the beginning of Trump’s second term, which started last January, the ‘Big Four’ firms—Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC—had avoided auditing many digital asset-related businesses in the U.S., due to a combination of the tough stance taken by regulators, particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and a lack of clear legislation governing the space.
2025 saw progress on removing both of these obstacles, and as a result, it appears to have inspired PwC’s apparent reappraisal of its interactions with digital assets.
Griggs told the FT that PwC is now “Top of Form” committed to being “hyper-engaged” in expanding both its auditing and consulting businesses to work with digital asset-related clients, and that since it made this decision, it has already seen “more and more opportunities coming our way.”
For this reason, Griggs also reported that PwC recently bolstered its resource pool “inside and outside” to fully engage with the digital asset space.
PwC isn’t the only Big Four firm that has moved towards embracing digital currency business in the past year. KPMG recently started its ‘Digital Assets Advisory services,’ saying that “amid accelerating regulatory developments, increased support from policymakers, and growing market activity, digital asset adoption is reaching a tipping point.”
This shift in attitude from blue-chip stalwarts of traditional finance signals an increasing acceptance of digital assets into the mainstream, something that arguably owes a significant debt to the progress made by Trump and his fellow crypto-advocate lawmakers in the U.S. to legitimize the space.
US regulatory shift
US President Donald Trump began implementing his pro-crypto agenda almost as soon as the final election count was completed in November 2024.
On December 4, 2024, he announced his pick for the new head of the SEC, Paul Atkins, someone who, according to Trump, “has worked on and studied the digital assets industry” and “recognizes that digital assets and other innovations are crucial.”
On January 20, 2025, Trump continued his reshaping of regulatory leadership with the appointment of Travis Hill as Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) acting head. Hill kicked off his reign by announcing the FDIC would be “providing a pathway for institutions to engage in crypto- and blockchain-related activities.” A week later, the President confirmed Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary, a man who told Fox Business in July 2024 that he had “been excited about the president’s embrace of crypto” and that “Crypto is about freedom, and the crypto economy is here to stay.”
The personnel changes didn’t stop there, on February 7, 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a U.S. consumer watchdog established after the global financial crash of 2008, saw the arrival of Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, as acting head, in a move seemingly intended to hamstring its financing and operations. A couple of days later, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), “a federal agency that regulates and supervises national banks and federal savings associations,” welcomed new acting chief Rodney Hood, the digital asset-friendly former chairman of the U.S. credit-union regulator.
But of all the new Trumpian appointments, Atkins’ arrival at the SEC was arguably the most significant.
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Revolution at the SEC’s
The SEC is one of the two primary regulators of the digital asset industry in the U.S., along with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Under its former chairman, the much-maligned Gary Gensler, it had become known for its hardline approach to overseeing the space.
In addition to declaring on numerous occasions that all digital assets, except Bitcoin, were securities—and thus under the SEC’s jurisdiction—Gensler also believed that crypto was rife with fraud and misconduct. This combination led the SEC to aggressively prosecute firms that failed to adhere to securities laws—such as registering with the regulator and submitting to its disclosure rules—in what became known, in the absence of any specific digital asset legislation, as “regulation by enforcement.”
Gensler stepped down in January before Trump was sworn into office—presumably seeing the writing on the wall for his tough stance on crypto—and Mark Uyeda, a Republican member of the SEC, stepped into the temporary role of Acting Chair until Atkins could be confirmed.
Rather than sitting around waiting for Atkins to arrive, Uyeda—who had previously called Gensler’s reign a “disaster for the whole industry”—swiftly set about undoing much of the hardline former chairman’s work.
One of his first acts was to remove the agency’s controversial Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121), a policy guideline released in March 2022 that outlined how virtual asset service providers (VASPs) must handle accounting for digital assets and imposed additional capital requirements on banks that want to handle digital assets for clients. It contained strict guidelines for institutions looking to custody digital assets, including the requirement that VASPs maintain their users’ digital asset holdings on their own balance sheets, which some saw as a way of dissuading established businesses from getting involved with the digital asset space.
Further changes followed: the regulator began to conspicuously drop several high-profile Gensler-era lawsuits against crypto firms, including Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Gemini, and Consensys; in February, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued a ‘staff statement’ declaring that memecoins aren’t securities, and thus memecoin issuers aren’t required to register with the SEC; on March 10, Uyeda revealed he had asked SEC staff “for options on abandoning” part of a proposed rule change that could force some digital asset firms to register with the regulator as exchanges; and on March 17, he announced that he had asked staff to consider dropping a Biden-era proposal to tighten digital asset custody requirements.
After Atkins was eventually sworn into office in April, things continued down this new crypto-friendly path.
In one of the most apparent departures yet from Gensler’s regulation-by-enforcement era, Atkins told the FT in September that “you can’t just suddenly come and bash down their door and say uh-uh, we caught you, you’re doing something and it’s a technical violation.”
For this reason, said Atkins, U.S. digital asset firms could henceforth expect “preliminary notices” before the agency acts. In other words, no more unexpected or surprise enforcement actions on digital asset firms.
This changing of tide at the top regulator overseeing the digital asset space was accompanied by progress finally being made on legislation that would provide more clarity for digital assets and those businesses that interact with them.
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GENIUS Act
On June 17, the U.S. Senate voted 68-30 in favor of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, and a month later, the bill was signed into law by Trump.
Among its mandates are strict reserve, liquidity, capital, and risk-management requirements, including that issuers must maintain reserves on a one-to-one basis with the value of outstanding stablecoins and provide transparency in reserve composition. It also imposes anti-money-laundering (AML), sanctions, and reporting obligations on issuers and custodians, with the former subject to the Bank Secrecy Act and required to certify that they have implemented AML and sanctions compliance programs.
In addition, major issuers with more than $50 billion in stablecoins outstanding—such as Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) and Tether—are required to submit audited annual financial statements.
The Act will take effect either 18 months after enactment (January 18, 2027) or 120 days after the date on which the federal banking regulators issue implementing regulations, whichever is sooner. Meanwhile, the restrictions on who can offer and sell payment stablecoins in the U.S. will take effect on July 18, 2028.
When it eventually all comes into force, the GENIUS Act should provide a mix of consumer and market protections while supporting the U.S. stablecoin space to grow—at least that’s how Congress sold it.
This new regulatory certainty for stablecoins is almost certainly a contributing factor in legacy firms such as PwC and KPMG feeling increasingly more comfortable dealing with digital asset clients.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/pwc-to-increase-engagement-with-digital-asset-firms/
