Compliance doesn’t make crypto risk-free | Opinion

A project can spend $500,000 on legal opinions, have a fully doxxed team, and pass every AML check in Singapore. It can still drain to zero in twelve seconds because of a math error in line 40 of its smart contract. This is the reality of modern crypto regulation and compliance.

Various jurisdictions built different kinds of Maginot Lines. They protect against front-door risks: money laundering, market manipulation, and misuse of customer funds. However, the most important factor is that regulatory posture is quite fragmented across jurisdictions, and not every regulator offers standards that are fulfillable in practice. 

While their intentions are good — prioritizing the legal protection of the end user — their focus is currently not on driving measurable improvement in how market participants operate. For example, the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act, or DORA, obliges financial entities to vet third-party providers and monitor their security posture rigorously; these are governance controls, not execution blocks. A supply chain attack — such as a compromised API or a malicious code injection in a vendor’s software update — can execute a scripted drain of funds or data in seconds (often automated at machine speed), far faster than any compliance audit or quarterly review can detect. 

In this scenario, being DORA-compliant simply means the entity has a pre-approved incident response plan to freeze operations, notify regulators, and activate insurance after the 15-second drain has already occurred. Meanwhile, the real threats — operational failure, technical incompetence, and fundamental economic flaws — remain unguarded.

Compliance brings traditional market rules to crypto, but it doesn’t make the compliant project invulnerable.

The compliance marketing

Right now, we’re stuck in compliance used as a marketing instrument. The industry treats a KYC badge like a safety certification. It’s not. Knowing the CEO’s name doesn’t matter if their protocol has no brakes.

Regulators are checking boxes:

• Risk mitigation plan? Check.
• Dependency risks outlined? Check.
• Private key exposure due to a social engineering attack? En route.

The approach of checking the boxes is wrong. Compliance is designed to catch criminals and bring projects into the regulatory perimeter, not prevent failures. And in crypto, incompetence destroys more capital than malice ever could.

Where the money actually disappears

Look where the real losses happen. In 2024, established, compliant businesses, centralized exchanges, and infrastructure projects with legal entities and doxxed teams suffered double the losses of decentralized protocols.

Fully compliant exchanges: Japanese DMM Bitcoin and Indian CoinDCX and WazirX weren’t rug pulls. They were regulated businesses that lost half a billion dollars through operational negligence. The reason for failure was the same for all: a supply chain attack with malware. And today, regulators don’t require an audit of those strictly. 

This describes the whole issue: we’re auditing the math while ignoring the manager and the biggest risk surface. Code audits might catch 14% of the risk. They completely miss the operational failures, like poor key management, that cause 75% of major losses.

Compliance AND measurable risk

We are confusing “permission to operate legally” with “safety.” A regulatory license keeps money launderers out. But it doesn’t check if the project will cease its operations tomorrow. 

Compliance is good at keeping dirty money out. It locks the door on criminals and sanctioned entities. But it leaves the window wide open for actual failure. A project can follow every AML rule and still go broke or get hacked because it mishandled its keys.

Essentially, we are only at the very beginning of the regulatory process. Expecting a comprehensive system that simultaneously ensures efficient tax collection, legal protection, and a resilient market is unrealistic at this stage. That is why regulation alone cannot currently solve the structural issues facing the market.

To fix this, the blockchain industry needs to self-regulate. One way to think about it is a shared “Probability of Loss” framework. It gives everyone a common language to assess risk:

• Investors: Instead of asking “Is this a scam?”, they can ask “Does this team actually know what they’re doing?”
• Institutions: They get real risk numbers, not just a basic check of the books.
• Regulators: They get a live health monitor, not just a one-time stamp of approval.

This metric covers what compliance ignores: reality. It looks at treasury diversification, access controls, and code quality. It measures the real structural state of a project that can project to its survival probability.

Hacken is currently developing a Self-Regulation platform, which aims to bridge the trust gap in the web3 economy. This solution, presently in beta testing, introduces the Probability of Loss (PoL) metric. The PoL metric functions as a “credit score” for web3, providing a single, forward-looking benchmark. It achieves this by synthesizing diverse risk indicators, aggregating data related to a project’s security, financial stability, and the historical conduct of its team.

The new due diligence

Currently, the industry’s trust model is broken. We trade on social signals: KOLs’ endorsements, big-name backers, and the false comfort of a regulatory license. These are just wrappers. They tell you nothing about the structural integrity of the product inside.

The question is no longer “Are they licensed?” or “Who is backing them?” The question is “What is the probability they fail?” The market needs to start pricing risk based on harsh reality, not regulatory theater.