Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal came down heavily on the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) over its recent report on crypto use for evading sanctions.

In an X (formerly Twitter) post on Jan. 22, Grewal said that the U.S. GAO carried out zero comparative analysis only to “harangue an industry that spends millions and millions to follow the law.” He highlighted that even in the report itself, buried deep in the links, are “admissions that digital assets are a relatively poor way to circumvent sanctions.”

The U.S. GAO report in question was published on Dec. 13, 2023, and on Jan. 16, the GAO published the federal response to the issue. The GAO report claimed that there have been several instances where foreign states facing U.S. sanctions used cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to bypass the sanctions imposed on them.

An excerpt from the report reads:

However, in the same report, the GAO admits that cryptocurrencies decentralized nature and public ledger could enable “U.S. agencies and analytics firms to trace transactions and potentially identify illicit actors.”

Apart from that, the report admits that using digital assets as a means of payment is limited. The report also noted that implementing global standards may increase compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations.

Despite these facts, the anti-crypto Senator Elizabeth Warren used the report to fearmonger against the industry. Warren is currently pushing a bill to ensure crypto companies follow the same AML regulations as other financial institutions.

However, people quickly told Warren that the report she cited mentioned just one instance of using cryptocurrencies to avoid sanctions, and the party involved was Chinese.

Major government regulatory bodies and policymakers worldwide have implemented frameworks to align crypto with Anti-Money Laundering guidelines. Europe has already passed the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, with Asian countries such as Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore also implementing strict regulations for crypto service providers.

Another major factor that most reports overlook or ignore is that the amount of crypto used for illicit activities is less than 1% of the total circulating supply — a significantly lower proportion compared to fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar. There have been several instances where stolen or hacked crypto funds have taken years for the perpetrators to move due to the public ledger system, and even in those cases, they are identified and often blocked by crypto exchanges.

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