As part of efforts to deregulate the crypto industry, President Donald Trump’s administration is reducing the number of staff handling enforcement actions against crypto firms within a special unit of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the primary financial regulator overseeing digital assets, according to theNew York Times .

One of the crypto industry's perennial grievances during Joe Biden's administration was the SEC's “aggressive” approach and “regulation by enforcement” under former Chair Gary Gensler. Last year, the SEC’s penalties against crypto firms totaled almost $5 billion . Under Gensler, who Trump threatened to fire before his resignation last month, the SEC lobbed 125 enforcement actions against digital asset firms, up from 70 during the tenure of his predecessor, Trump-appointed SEC Chair Jay Clayton.

On Tuesday, White House crypto czar David Sacks decried years of “arbitrary prosecution and persecution“ under the previous administration, and promised to offer the sector regulatory clarity.

Meanwhile, the SEC's special unit overseeing crypto enforcement action is now seeing many of its lawyers reassigned to other areas of the agency, with at least one “demotion” for a senior member, the Times reports.

The CEO of Coinbase, America’s largest crypto exchange, also recently announced that he would blacklist any law firms hiring former SEC senior lawyers who committed “bad deeds.”

“It's an ethics violation in my book to try and unlawfully kill an industry while refusing to publish clear rules,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote. “If you were senior there, you cannot say you were just following orders. They had the option to leave the SEC and many good people did. It was not a normal SEC tenure.”