What do SEC and CFTC press releases reveal about crypto regulation efforts?

The Block Research has previously analyzed press releases by the Department of Justice to gauge the growth of criminal activities that involve the use of bitcoin. The United States law enforcement agencies rarely publish crypto-specific reports and data with regularity, likely due to the industry's novelty. In some cases, we see crypto-related crime and enforcements mentioned in a few paragraphs, if not a few sentences of an annual crime report. 

Because of the limited public crypto data released by the SEC and the CFTC — two of the U.S. government’s largest market regulators — for this piece, we use press releases published by these regulators. As with our last piece, we note that press releases account for just a fraction of the total number of enforcement actions by the SEC and CFTC, but we believe they can be used as a proxy to measure crypto regulation efforts by these two agencies.