Partner Christopher Gerold of Lowenstein’s Securities Litigation, Corporate Investigations & Integrity, and Crypto practices and former chief of the New Jersey Bureau of Securities (BOS) speaks to Blockworks about New Jersey’s proposed new crypto regulatory framework under the Digital Asset and Blockchain Technology Act, introduced in 2002 and recently amended. Gerold says the regulation now has “a much more consumer-protection slant,” going farther than New York’s rules by addressing custody concerns and requiring licensees that offer digital assets to maintain enough to satisfy entitlements. Gerold tells the story of his mother asking him in 2017, while he led the BOS, whether she should purchase bitcoin: “And that’s when I realized we have a problem here, because you have retail investors not understanding how it works, but they’re thinking about investing in it.” He began pursuing thousands of purported ICOs and issuing cease and desist orders, including against Steven Seagal’s Bitcoiin, and, eventually, against companies offering interest-earning crypto accounts. “We decided there needed to be some guardrails, they needed to come into compliance with the securities laws and they had to register these products if they were going to sell them.” Gerold believes that “we’re going to see more regulation [of digital assets] at the state level” as federal agencies like the SEC and the CFTC consider “a log-jam of ideas” about how to and who should regulate digital asset exchanges.