Of all the crypto bankruptcies over the past year, the FTX Chapter 11 proceeding is the only one that’s had a Department of Justice attorney assigned to represent the Internal Revenue Service.

Deputy Attorney General David Hubbert filed notice for Department of Justice trial attorney Elisabeth Bruce (replacing attorney Warren Benson, who was assigned in December) to appear in the FTX bankruptcy proceedings on Thursday.

There’s been no indication of the IRS’s exact interest in the case. A call to the IRS’s press office from Decrypt yielded a decline to comment. It’s also not clear if the agency plans to pursue its own litigation against the bankrupt crypto exchange. But the fact that it's involved at all is notable, especially given the IRS's prior interest in the customer data of major crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken.

“If there was some very administrative thing that just needed to be handled, the Department of Justice's tax division is like, ‘Yeah, we don't care about that. We'll let you guys handle that,’” Fuller said. “But for any sort of really substantive tax related matter or high profile tax matter, they say, ‘No, no, we want to do that.’”