DeFi Groups Urge SEC to Formalize Interface Rule

The DeFi Education Fund and 35 co-signatories, including a16z crypto, Aptos Labs, Uniswap, Chainlink, Paradigm, the Solana Policy Institute and Phantom, asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt formal notice-and-comment rulemaking for an April staff statement on DeFi interfaces.

On April 13 the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets issued a staff statement saying some operators of user interfaces that connect to decentralized finance protocols do not need to register as broker-dealers when users retain control of their funds. The guidance allows certain front-end providers to receive transaction-based compensation without registering, provided the interface does not custody user assets or take actions that would create a broker-dealer relationship.

The petitioners requested that the Commission convert that interim staff statement into a permanent rule. The April statement is designated as an interim position that will be considered withdrawn five years after publication unless the Commission adopts it as a rule or takes other action. The filing warns that leaving the guidance temporary would leave legal uncertainty for builders and users of non-custodial interfaces.

Separately, Ethereum developer Tom Lehman published a draft Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-8182, proposing to add native private transfers to the protocol. The draft would create a shared shielded pool as a system contract and add a zero-knowledge proof–verification precompile to Ethereum. The proposal specifies the pool would operate without an admin key, without a governance token and without an on-chain upgrade mechanism; protocol changes would occur through Ethereum’s regular hard-fork process.

The signatories to the SEC petition represent protocol teams, developer organizations and venture firms that depend on front-end interfaces for user access to decentralized services. Their filing says formal rulemaking would provide clearer legal guidance for how non-custodial interfaces may be compensated and operated.

EIP-8182 follows earlier comments from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin advocating for stronger wallet-level privacy options. The draft and earlier comments outline two different technical paths: interface-level privacy tools that operate off-chain or third-party, and protocol-level privacy features built into the base layer.

If private transfers are added at the protocol level, wallets could present shielded balances without relying on third-party privacy tools. That change would affect how front-end providers offer private sends and intersect with the SEC’s focus on non-custodial interfaces and their compensation models.

The SEC has not indicated whether it will open notice-and-comment rulemaking on the staff statement. EIP-8182 is under review within the Ethereum community as developers and stakeholders assess technical design, privacy trade-offs and potential regulatory implications.