New Hampshire, USA

Crypto Licensing

New Hampshire's crypto-licensing regime continues to rest on RSA 399-G, which requires any person acting as a money transmitter in or into the state, including a crypto exchange administering or transmitting virtual currency, to obtain a Banking Department licence through the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System unless an exemption applies under RSA 399-G:3. This period's development is HB 639, the Blockchain Basic Laws, which adds home digital-asset mining, digital-asset mining businesses, and blockchain node operation to the set of activities exempt from that money-transmitter licensure requirement. The exemption is newly enacted and narrow in scope: it reaches mining and node-operation activity specifically, and does not disturb the licensure requirement for exchange or custodial activity, which remains governed by the standing RSA 399-G framework as previously amended by HB1241 (2024).

The Department's supervisory authority over licensees is unchanged and remains meaningful: RSA 399-G:20(III) permits the Commissioner to revoke or suspend a licence where doing so serves the public interest and the licensee or a controlling person has, within the prior five years, been subject to a licence denial, suspension, or revocation order. The 2025 order to show cause against BAM Trading Services Inc. illustrates that this authority has been actively exercised in the recent past, tying the state's crypto-licensing perimeter to a demonstrated enforcement record rather than a purely dormant statutory power. Operators should treat the mining and node-operation exemption as a genuine but bounded liberalisation: it narrows the perimeter of what requires a money-transmitter licence without altering the licensure pathway or the Department's enforcement posture for activity that remains within it.

Outlook

The exact effective date of HB 639's substantive provisions has not been pinned to a specific calendar date against the enrolled act text, with secondary sources reporting inconsistently; confirming this against the primary legislative record would sharpen the picture for any operator relying on the new mining or node-operation exemption.

Crypto Licensing

New Hampshire's crypto-licensing perimeter is defined by an increasingly layered set of statutory exemptions built on top of a firm baseline requirement. RSA 399-G:3, VII, in force since 2017, exempts persons who engage solely in selling or issuing payment instruments or receiving convertible virtual currency for transmission from money-transmitter licensure under RSA 399-G. This standing exemption is confirmed at Confirmed confidence from a Tier-1 New Hampshire Banking Department source, and it is not a new development but the durable baseline against which this cycle's changes should be read.

What is new this cycle is HB 639, the Blockchain Basic Laws, which exempts node operators, miners, and certain staking-service providers from RSA 399-G licensing. This provision is enacted but not yet effective, with an effective date of August 18, 2026, and rests at Probable confidence on a Tier-3 secondary source (CryptoSlate), corroborated by a Tier-2 municipal mirror of the bill text. Critically, the baseline rule that a business transmitting money in both fiat and cryptocurrency remains required to hold an RSA 399-G licence is unchanged and confirmed at Tier-1 confidence; neither the 2017 exemption nor HB 639 disturbs this. The New Hampshire Banking Department remains the supervisory authority for the licensed population, while newly exempted node operators, miners, and stakers move outside its licensing jurisdiction entirely as of the HB 639 effective date.

The overall trajectory is liberalising: New Hampshire has, since 2017, and now again in 2026, progressively narrowed the population of crypto-adjacent businesses subject to money-transmitter licensure, while preserving the licensing requirement for any entity that mixes fiat and crypto transmission. This bifurcation is the defining structural feature of the state's crypto-licensing regime as it stands after this cycle.

Outlook

Whether HB 639 has been formally chaptered with a Laws-of-2026 chapter number, and whether the RSA 359-V section numbering is final, was not independently confirmed this cycle and remains an open verification item. The practical scale of node-operator, mining, and staking activity that will actually benefit from the new exemption once effective on August 18, 2026 is also unconfirmed and will determine how material this liberalisation proves in practice.

Crypto Licensing

New Hampshire's crypto-licensing regime rests on two exemptions layered onto the general RSA 399-G money-transmitter framework. The founding exemption, under RSA 399-G:3, VII, exempts persons who engage solely in selling, issuing, or receiving convertible virtual currency for transmission, with no fiat leg, from money-transmitter licensing; this is a settled, well-sourced provision in force since 2017 and one of the cleanest such carve-outs among U.S. states. This cycle adds a second, newly enacted exemption: HB639 (2026), whose definitions section took effect January 1, 2026, exempts blockchain node operators, miners and home digital-asset-mining businesses from RSA 399-G licensing solely for engaging in node operation or mining. This second exemption is sourced only to a Tier 4 trade-press account this cycle; no Tier 1 New Hampshire General Court statute text has yet corroborated its precise scope.

Neither exemption extends to fiat-touching custodial activity. The New Hampshire Banking Department's May 27, 2025 Order to Show Cause against BAM Trading Services Inc., doing business as Binance.US, an NH-licensed money transmitter (NMLS #1906829), remains active this cycle. The order was brought on character-and-fitness grounds following the firm's majority owner's November 2023 federal guilty plea for willfully causing Binance Holdings Limited to fail to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program under the Bank Secrecy Act. This is a primary-source, high-confidence finding that anchors the licensing perimeter's outer edge: custodial exchange activity touching fiat remains squarely within RSA 399-G's licensing and enforcement scope even as non-custodial infrastructure activity is exempted from it.

Outlook

The principal item to watch is whether Tier 1 statute text for HB639 becomes available, which would allow the node/mining exemption finding to be upgraded in confidence and would clarify its precise boundaries. Separately, watch for whether the BAM Trading Order to Show Cause resolves to a final licence action, settlement, or dismissal in the coming cycle.

Token Classification

New Hampshire's token-classification regime saw a narrow but notable state-law development this cycle. HB 639 excludes own-funds Bitcoin mining and certain staking activity from treatment as a securities offering under New Hampshire state law, which narrows the enforcement reach of the state's Bureau of Securities Regulation specifically in that space. This claim rests at Uncertain confidence on a single Tier-3 secondary source, and the provision is enacted but not yet effective, with an effective date of August 18, 2026.

The carve-out is explicitly narrow in scope: it applies to own-funds mining and certain staking activity, not to token issuance, sale, or offering activity more broadly, and it operates only at the state-securities-law level. Federal securities-law characterisation of the same activities continues to control generally and is unaffected by this state-law exclusion. This means a mining or staking operation excluded from New Hampshire's own state securities-offering treatment could nonetheless remain subject to federal securities-law analysis under the Howey framework or related federal doctrine, a distinction this state-law provision does not and cannot resolve.

No other token-classification development, including any New Hampshire-specific position on stablecoin tokens, utility tokens, or NFT classification, was identified in evidence reaching this cycle.

Outlook

The practical significance of this carve-out will depend on whether New Hampshire's Bureau of Securities Regulation issues further interpretive guidance narrowing or clarifying the scope of "own-funds" mining and "certain" staking activity, neither of which was addressed in evidence available this cycle. The persistence of federal-level securities characterisation as the operative constraint for any entity relying on this state carve-out is also worth monitoring, since the state exclusion alone would not shield an operation from federal enforcement.

On-Chain Activity Regime

New Hampshire's on-chain activity regime tightened protections for miners and expanded sovereign digital-asset exposure this cycle through two distinct instruments. First, HB 639 prohibits state and local government agencies from imposing discriminatory rate schedules on digital-asset mining businesses, an affirmative protective provision for mining operations against differential utility or tax treatment by New Hampshire government bodies. This claim is corroborated at Probable confidence by a Tier-2 municipal-mirror source of the bill text.

Second, and separately, RSA 6:8-d, enacted via HB 302 and effective July 5, 2025, authorizes, but does not require, the state treasurer to hold up to 5 percent of certain public funds in Bitcoin or other digital assets averaging over $500 billion in market capitalisation. The statute specifies permissible custody arrangements: a multisig wallet, a qualified custodian, or a registered exchange-traded product. This is confirmed at Confirmed confidence from a Tier-3 secondary source and represents a first-in-nation state-treasury Bitcoin reserve authorisation, a notable on-chain-adjacent sovereign posture even though the statute itself governs treasury asset allocation rather than on-chain transaction activity directly.

Together, these two developments show New Hampshire simultaneously protecting the mining/validation activity layer from discriminatory local treatment and formally authorising, at the state-treasury level, direct exposure to the assets that layer produces. The state's overall traffic-light assessment for this module reflects the newly enacted affirmative protections plus the first-in-nation treasury statute as materially liberalising developments.

Outlook

Whether the state treasurer has exercised or intends to exercise the RSA 6:8-d authorization in practice, and at what scale, was not addressed in evidence reaching this cycle; the statute is permissive rather than mandatory. The practical enforcement of the anti-discriminatory-rate-schedule provision for mining businesses against any specific New Hampshire municipality or utility has also not been tested in evidence available this cycle.

On-Chain Activity Regime

HB639 (2026) is this cycle's defining development for New Hampshire's on-chain-activity regime. The statute, per Tier 4 trade-press sourcing, confirms that operating a node or series of nodes on a blockchain protocol does not require a New Hampshire money-transmitter licence under RSA 399-G, and separately confirms that engaging in home digital-asset mining or operating a digital-asset-mining business likewise does not require such a licence. Both findings are held at a conservative confidence level because no Tier 1 New Hampshire General Court statute text has yet corroborated the exemption's precise scope; the finding rests entirely on secondary reporting describing the bill's provisions.

Taken together with New Hampshire's pre-existing statutory protection for standalone convertible-virtual-currency transmission, these carve-outs describe a jurisdiction actively narrowing the scope of on-chain activity subject to state licensing, while leaving fiat-touching activity, addressed separately under this jurisdiction's crypto-licensing record, within the existing perimeter. HB639 is also reported to protect self-custody wallet use from state or local restriction, a further liberalising feature of the same legislative package, though this specific protection was not independently corroborated to a claim-level finding this cycle beyond the node- and mining-licensing exemptions themselves.

Outlook

Confirmation of Tier 1 statute text for HB639 is the single most consequential open item for this module: it would allow both the node-operation and mining exemptions to be upgraded from their current conservative confidence level and would settle any ambiguity in the exemption's scope, including whether it extends beyond node operation and mining to related on-chain activities not addressed by this cycle's record.

Consumer Protection

New Hampshire's consumer-protection posture in the crypto domain combines a general, non-crypto-specific state consumer-guidance function with a newly emerging crypto-adjacent commercial development. The New Hampshire Department of Justice publishes consumer guidance on cryptocurrency scams as part of its NH Consumer Insight series, a Tier 1-sourced, general consumer-facing resource rather than a dedicated crypto statute. This cycle, DraftKings rolled out a crypto-to-cash sportsbook deposit feature in New Hampshire, converting deposited digital assets to USD before any wager is placed and not holding cryptocurrency in player wallets; no native crypto wagering or in-wallet crypto custody is offered. This development sits at the intersection of gambling regulation and crypto consumer protection, and it raises questions about deposit-sourcing and consumer safeguards that no dedicated New Hampshire crypto-consumer-protection statute yet addresses. It is sourced to Tier 3 trade press this cycle, and the exact live date of the rollout has not been confirmed by any Tier 1 New Hampshire Lottery Commission bulletin.

Outlook

Watch for whether New Hampshire issues any dedicated guidance addressing crypto-funded gambling deposits specifically, and whether a Tier 1 source becomes available to confirm the precise rollout date of the DraftKings crypto-to-cash deposit feature, which remains an open sourcing gap this cycle.