Even if ignorance of the law was a defense, at a certain point Gensler started using almost every official utterance to make it clear that most crypto are unregistered securities.

He also didn’t use some newly half baked regulatory authority as law making exercise to come to this conclusion the way many executive branch agencies do. He leaned on the Howey test, a 1946 SCOTUS interpretation of a law from 1933.

None of this is exactly novel and you could have found many lawyers capable of predicting just this sort of outcome. In fact, you probably had to work pretty hard and pay a lot of money to find lawyers who would ignore this amount of precedence.