The article doesn't call for regulation at the protocol level; it provides examples of how the market is building safeguards into the stuff that sits on top. In any event, I think it's important to distinguish between baseline DeFi, where I agree autonomy should be preserved, and on-chain capital markets, which is what this article is about. The latter involves important investor protection and market integrity considerations that will require certain safeguards, and in implementing that, market-driven, technology-based solutions are preferable where possible (like many of the tools from Flashbots and Jito's BAM which are designed to improve order execution quality). Without such assurances of basic fairness and integrity, investors and issuers won't participate in on-chain capital markets, nor will regulators be on board.

You've proposed that builders should adopt compliance solutions in the "architecture" of their protocols (whitelists, verified pools, etc.) to deliver on U.S. regulatory goals and suggested that regulators should be focused on such solutions. That's no different that calling for regulation of protocols. If you argue that "baseline DeFi" should be distinguished from "onchain capital markets", then what you're essentially saying is that securities can't trade on ordinary DEXs and can only trade on protocols that comply with a regulatory scheme. That fundamentally undermines the value proposition of DeFi — it's an approach that eliminates the possibility of those protocols being neutral infrastructure in a global financial system, and instead results in a balkanized and fractured system. Further, you risk opening the door to that being extrapolated to ordinary trading of digital assets. The solutions that many entrepreneurs are working on are great, but market forces — not regulators or policymakers — should dictate whether they're necessary or desirable.

fully agree not only are there differences among each jurisdiction (which would lead to fragmentation of capital markets) but also, law mostly does not consist of objective deterministic rules, so unless you want fascism you have to allow for e.g. multiple interps of American law

Agree entirely, protocols are not financial institutions and encoding policy into code ≠ decentralization. Once compliance logic depends on policy-driven oracles or credential providers, those entities exercise de facto control. It is re-intermediation via code.

Honestly thats all just diplomatic speak for "lets create corp chains so we are in compliance with the state and make lots of money with tradfi and visa!".

Makes sense, autonomy is the whole point of blockchain