The Crypto Security Maturity Moment: New Rules, Bigger Targets, Faster Defense
written by: Justine Bone
This is what “bigger target” actually means
The most important stories in crypto right now are about how digital-asset capabilities are being embedded into established financial products and customer workflows - payments, custody, settlement, onboarding, account recovery, and fraud operations. When that happens, the attack surface doesn’t just grow. It changes shape.
Banking leaders are already describing this convergence: Allison Miller (Technology Executive – Innovation, Strategy & GenAI at Wells Fargo) frames “Cyber Fraud Fusion” as the convergence of techniques and technologies across enterprise cybersecurity and product abuse/fraud, with customer onboarding and authentication as a key overlap.
That same convergence is showing up in crypto-specific contexts too. In our recent Crypto ISAC announcement, Coinbase notes that as crypto and traditional finance converge across payments, custody, and customer workflows, adversaries increasingly target the shared people, processes, and infrastructure across connected systems.
Regulatory momentum is unlocking adoption and raising the security bar
In the U.S., the “CLARITY” Act is designed to establish a clearer market structure for digital assets, while the GENIUS Act proposes a federal framework for stablecoins. Internationally, the Commonwealth Secretariat has released a model law intended to help 56 member countries of the Commonwealth regulate virtual assets - explicitly describing the approach as aligned with standards set by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Those FATF standards have anchored the industry’s compliance center of gravity for years - AML/CFT expectations, VASP controls, and Travel Rule implementations. But “compliance maturity” cannot stop there if adoption is expanding into broader financial and customer environments. It should also include cybersecurity governance grounded in recognized frameworks such as ISO 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, plus crypto-specific standards like the Blockchain Security Standards Council’s blockchain security standards and the CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS), which is an auditable standard complementing pre-existing cybersecurity standards like ISO 27001.
Because scaled crypto adoption also touches personal data, privacy compliance becomes non-optional as well. GDPR has shaped privacy risk management for years - and as digital-asset products plug into mainstream customer and data workflows, those same expectations apply. That’s one reason privacy-preserving stablecoin architectures are gaining attention, such as Circle’s USDC becoming available on the privacy and compliance-first blockchain, Aleo.
Faster rails demand faster defense: automation + actionability
Attackers are leveraging AI - making schemes more believable while reducing the time and effort required to deceive targets - and to accelerate the technical side of offensive cyber operations, from spotting vulnerabilities to helping generate exploits. (ic3.gov) (ncsc.gov.uk) Timing pressure is especially unforgiving in crypto. In a 2025 study, Global Ledger found that in the fastest observed case, stolen funds moved within seconds, and that responders often have only a 10–15 minute window before assets are effectively out the door. (gcffc.org)
So when the first movements happen in seconds and the response window is measured in minutes, indicators must be reliable enough to drive automated blocking, alerting, or interdiction. That’s why “actionable intelligence” must be defined by quality: vetted, high-confidence indicators and patterns that can be operationalized. Lower-confidence or early, low-signal reporting still has an important place for awareness and investigation - but it needs to be clearly labeled and kept distinct from the kind of intelligence data used to trigger automated controls.
Automation is key to getting high-confidence intelligence into the right places quickly. CISA’s AIS program is one public-sector example of real-time sharing of machine-readable indicators and defensive measures. (cisa.gov) A second example is what a Crypto ISAC looks like when it’s built for today’s threat tempo: continuous sharing, automation-first delivery, and clear distinction between operational-grade intelligence data and emerging signals used for analysis.
In practice, this means continuous, high-confidence sharing that supports both analysis and operational controls.
Proof point: Crypto ISAC’s automated data sharing - with Coinbase high-confidence contributions
Crypto ISAC and Coinbase announced an expanded integration that enables Coinbase to continuously share select, high-confidence threat intelligence exclusively to the Crypto ISAC member community, including unique, high-confidence Coinbase-sourced indicators and patterns. Crypto ISAC is the mechanism that operationalizes and distributes that intelligence across members in a consistent, automation-ready way. Crucially, the value isn’t just “more data”, it’s proven and vetted intelligence that members can trust enough to use operationally: indicators and patterns intended to help organizations identify, disrupt, and mitigate attacks faster.
Closing: beyond compliance, toward operational defense
Regulatory clarity is a catalyst for adoption. And as adoption accelerates and the attack surface changes shape, the industry’s definition of “mature” can’t stop at traditional crypto or financial crimes compliance. These controls remain necessary, but they’re not sufficient in environments where digital-asset rails are plugged into high-scale customer workflows and core financial systems.
This moment calls for the same baseline expectations we apply everywhere else cybersecurity matters: mature risk management programs and governance anchored in proven cybersecurity standards like ISO 27001 and NIST CSF - including the ISO controls that explicitly expect threat intelligence and engagement with external security communities - plus the ISAC-style operating model that turns that expectation into practice through trusted, vetted sharing, so organizations can act on high-confidence intelligence under pressure. (iso.org) (nvlpubs.nist.gov)
That’s why this is the crypto industry’s maturity moment: regulatory clarity, system convergence, scalable defense - and a shared commitment to making high-confidence information usable.
Crypto ISAC is the trusted hub that turns member-contributed intelligence into vetted, automation-ready sharing across a member community. The Coinbase-supported stream described here is delivered exclusively to vetted Crypto ISAC members - so organizations can operationalize high-confidence indicators with speed and confidence. Join Crypto ISAC, sponsor practitioner programming and events, or reach out to explore integrations and sharing workflows that prioritize quality and action.
Meet the Crypto Security Maturity Moment.
About Crypto ISAC
The Crypto ISAC is a member-driven, not-for-profit organization that works together to curb malicious actors, address vulnerabilities, share intelligence, and move security forward to protect the crypto ecosystem. We are founded by leading crypto organizations and designed for cryptosecurity experts to address the security and trust challenges that face crypto today and shape the crypto ecosystem of tomorrow.
