Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law.

Editor’s note

New developments in crypto this week are challenging a number of critical boundaries of legal authority. We are, consequently, looking at several cases that promise to set new lines for government reach and overreach.

Cassius lamented Caesar bestriding the narrow world like a colossus. While nothing on the docket today is going to be as dramatic as the death of the Roman Republic, we did actually see a pretty eerie yet oddly comical dress rehearsal for bad actors masquerading as state leaders. We’re also looking at some national regulators who are looking to go well outside of their obvious borders.

In last week’s Law Decoded, I pointed out that the crypto industry has a bad habit of forgetting that regulators handling crypto are handling other colossal financial systems at the same time. In some sense, today’s newsletter is a retracing of that sentiment. There’s a lot of power at play.