Algorithmic Gatekeeping in Crypto Markets: Governing AI Driven Market Access in Centralized Exchange

Centralized crypto exchanges increasingly govern market access through AI-dominated, vendor-supplied infrastructure that performs core gatekeeping functions, including transaction surveillance, risk scoring, listing and delisting decisions, and account restrictions. These systems exercise authority comparable to that of regulated financial intermediaries yet operate within a fragmented U.S. regulatory landscape in which jurisdictional uncertainty, enforcement constraints, and reliance on case-by-case litigation have limited the development of binding oversight. This paper argues that the resulting governance gap is primarily a consequence of the absence of institutional frameworks capable of disciplining automated market access as infrastructure. Drawing on recent enforcement actions, vendor concentration practices, and comparative analysis of the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the paper demonstrates that effective governance of opaque, automated infrastructure is possible and already implemented in other countries through procedural accountability, documentation, and human oversight, rather than technical explainability. The paper contributes a DORA-inspired governance framework focused on internal controls, auditability, and clearly assigned human responsibility for AI-mediated decision-making within centralized exchanges. The analysis does not seek to resolve underlying classification disputes but instead identifies the legal and institutional conditions under which automated gatekeeping could be brought within a regime of enforceable oversight.