The Texas Attorney General and Bitcoin: One Suit, No Opinions

What is the office, and what is it not?

The Attorney General of Texas is the state's chief civil lawyer: it sues on the state's behalf, defends its agencies and statutes, enforces the Deceptive Trade Practices Act against businesses that cheat consumers, issues formal opinions construing Texas law when officials ask, and rules on public records requests when agencies refuse them. It is not the state's securities regulator. That is the Texas State Securities Board, an independent agency under the Securities Commissioner, which was the first state securities regulator in the country to act against a crypto firm, led the 2018 sweep, has entered more than seventy crypto orders, and has named the asset its top investor threat; nor is it the Department of Banking, which licenses money transmitters and issued the 2021 guidance letting banks custody virtual currency.^[21][20][27] When those agencies go to court, the Attorney General's lawyers go with them as counsel of record, and much of what the press has called “Texas” acting on crypto is that. This page keeps the distinction, because the question it answers – what has the office itself done with the asset – depends on it. The enforcement the state's federal prosecutors have done is a different record, on the Texas crypto enforcement report and the case tracker.

What did the office do as the regulators' lawyer?

Object, in New York, three times, and lose once. When Celsius failed in the summer of 2022, the Securities Board and the Department of Banking objected to its plan to sell stablecoins to fund operations – “troublingly broad permission to sell assets insufficiently defined for purposes that are also insufficiently defined” – and Attorney General lawyers argued it; at the November hearing on the examiner's scope an assistant attorney general told the court, “Sometimes sunlight is the best disinfectant.”^[11][12]On October 14, 2022 the office objected to Voyager's sale to FTX, stating that the two “are not in compliance with Texas law” and attaching the Securities Board's declaration that it was investigating FTX and its founder for unregistered yield accounts – three weeks before FTX collapsed, the first public disclosure by any regulator that it was looking.^[9] In early 2023 the same agencies, through the same counsel, objected twice to Voyager's replacement sale to Binance.US over its ties to Binance.com; the court approved the sale anyway.^[10] That is the whole of the office's enforcement-side crypto docket, and none of it was initiated by the office. The exchange whose founder that declaration named, and the Texas cases that followed, are in the Texas crypto archive.

What is the one suit?

Kentucky et al. v. SEC, filed November 14, 2024 in the Eastern District of Kentucky by eighteen states and the DeFi Education Fund, with three lawyers from the office's Special Litigation Division signing for Texas. The complaint's theory is federalism: the SEC “has sought to unilaterally wrest regulatory authority away from the States through an ongoing series of enforcement actions targeting the digital asset industry,” without congressional authorization, treating assets as investment contracts when they “are just that – assets”; it counts Texas among the states that offer tax breaks to miners, and it asks for declaratory and injunctive relief under the Administrative Procedure Act.^[1] Paxton's release: “Federal bureaucrats in Washington have no authority to dictate to States how they should interact with cryptocurrency nor do they have the power to crush this new field with a regulatory framework that Congress never intended” – and the securities acts, he added, are “almost 100 years old and in no way apply to cryptocurrency exchanges.”^[2][3] Then the administration changed, the SEC's leadership changed, and on April 16, 2025 the parties jointly asked for a pause; the court granted sixty days, quoting the Commission's view that the case “could potentially be resolved.”^[4] Nothing has been reported on the docket since.^[5] The office's one affirmative case on the asset was filed in the last weeks of one administration and went quiet in the first weeks of the next, and it has made no law.

What did it sit out?

The fights on its own ground. In February 2024 the Texas Blockchain Council and Riot Platforms sued the Department of Energy in Waco over an emergency survey of miners' power use, won a temporary restraining order the next day, and by March 1 had the survey withdrawn and its data destroyed; the only amicus was the Sierra Club, and the state was not a party.^[7] In July 2024 seven states – Iowa, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma – filed an amicus for two Texas plaintiffs suing the SEC in Fort Worth; Texas did not.^[6] In December 2024 the same council sued the IRS over the DeFi broker rule in the Northern District of Texas, without the state.^[8] No Texas amicus has been located in Coinbase's or Ripple's cases, no Texas suit against the bank regulators over debanking, and no multistate letter on a central bank digital currency, the GENIUS Act, or a federal Bitcoin reserve with Texas on it – the state's CBDC opposition ran through the Legislature. What it did sign, on October 21, 2025, was Iowa's twenty-one-state letter asking the SEC's Crypto Task Force for definitions clear enough not to preempt state fraud and money-transmitter law; what it did not sign, in September 2026, was New York's eighteen-state letter against the CLARITY Act, whose every signatory was a Democratic office.^[16][17] The pattern is partisan-coalition litigation and nothing bespoke: the office joined the multistate suit that every Republican attorney general joined, and no case that was Texas's alone. The council that brought the Texas cases is on Lee Bratcher and Bitcoin.

What did it do about the miners' data?

Rule for the public, and get sued for it. Under SB 1929, Johnson's 2023 registry, mines drawing more than 75 megawatts registered with the Public Utility Commission by February 2025. Reporters for Straight Arrow News and the Texas Tribune asked for the registrations; the commission refused, citing the critical-infrastructure exception. On May 15, 2025 an assistant attorney general ruled that the PUC “failed to demonstrate the information at issue identifies the technical details of particular vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to an act of terrorism” and ordered release.^[13] On June 27 the commission sued the Attorney General in Travis County district court: “In the wrong hands, this information could be used by terrorists to plan attacks on Texas's energy grid and critical infrastructure.”^[14] By November the PUC had spent tens of thousands of dollars keeping the list secret, and the case was still pending; no ruling has been found since.^[15] It is the one matter on the asset the office decided on its own, and it decided against the industry's preference and for the record. The registry itself, and the senator who wrote it, are on Nathan Johnson and Bitcoin; the sites the list would name are on the Texas Bitcoin mining map.

What has it never done?

Construe the asset, or protect a consumer from it. In eleven years the office has issued no formal opinion – the KP series – on virtual currency, cryptocurrency, blockchain, a central bank digital currency, the bullion depository, or whether a county may accept crypto; its nearest approach to digital money is KP-0057 of January 2016, which found paid daily fantasy sports to be illegal gambling where the house takes a cut.^[18][21] A 2023 statute assigned it a study of a bullion-depository debit card, due May 31, 2024; the report has not been located.^[19] The 2021 virtual-currency statute and the 2025 reserve assign it no role at all: SB 21 gives custody, administration, and management to the Comptroller, and no opinion request about the reserve has surfaced.^[26][27] On the consumer side, no enforcement action under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act against a cryptocurrency company, no lawsuit against a kiosk operator, and no consumer alert specific to the machines have been found – while the Securities Board, next door, has entered more than seventy orders and runs the state's crypto-scam education page.^[20][21] The number the absence sits beside: Texans lost about $56.8 million to crypto-kiosk scams in 2025, roughly 1,200 victims across some 4,000 machines, and more than a billion dollars to crypto fraud of all kinds, second only to California; the largest kiosk operator, with about 900 Texas machines, filed for bankruptcy in May 2026 citing “increasing litigation and regulatory enforcement” – in other states, by other attorneys general.^{[22][25][23][24]} The Tribune's July report on the kiosks names the FBI, the Department of Banking, and a county district attorney. It does not name the office.^[22]

The honest counterweight: what the ledger does and does not show

Two things cut the other way, and both belong on the page. First, the office is not indifferent to the asset; it put the state's name on the most consequential crypto federalism suit of the decade, with a release that read like an industry brief, and it did so before the federal posture changed and made the position costless.^[1][2] Second, the one call it made alone was the harder one: it ordered a regulator to publish the miners' power registrations over the regulator's terrorism objection, and has spent a year in court defending that.^[13][14] The counterweight to the counterweight is timing and selection. The crypto plank on the Attorney General's own Senate platform was added “in recent months,” the Statesman found, and names one bill; the office's record did not change with it, and the burst of technology suits it filed in the runoff's last days contained no crypto case.^[29][30] The office joined none of the 2025 multistate prediction-market efforts – thirty-four, forty-four, and thirty-eight states – after contributions from a prediction-market operator, though its own 2016 opinion had found the analogous product to be gambling; that is not a crypto matter, but it is the same office deciding which coalitions to join, and it is the nearest thing to an explanation the record offers for the pattern.^[28][18]

The fair reading is that the Texas Attorney General's office has treated Bitcoin as a federalism question and not a consumer one: it has fought Washington's right to regulate the asset and left Texans who were robbed of it to the Securities Board, the Banking Department, the FBI, and the county prosecutors. Whether that is a policy or an omission is the question the next Attorney General inherits, along with a stayed case in Kentucky and a pending one in Travis County.

Where does the office stand today?

As of September 2026: one crypto suit stayed since April 2025, one records case pending since June 2025, one coalition letter signed, no opinion, no enforcement action, and an occupant leaving for a U.S. Senate race.^{[5][15][16][29]} On November 3 the office changes hands for the first time since January 2015, between two state senators who both voted for the reserve and neither of whom has stated a position on the kiosks, the SEC suit, or the miners' data.^[31][32] They are on Mayes Middleton and Bitcoin and Nathan Johnson and Bitcoin. The reserve the office has no role in is on the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve reference; the statute-by-statute record it has never construed is on the Texas Bitcoin law timeline. This page is the lawyer's office, and the brief it has not written.