The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked Coinbase to halt all crypto trading operations except for Bitcoin (BTC).
Financial Times (FT) report cites the San Francisco-based crypto exchange Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong.
He claims that SEC’s request came prior to the regulator’s lawsuit against the exchange. On July 6, SEC sued Coinbase for allegedly operating in the US without having the necessary registrations.
Moreover, Armstrong believes that the agency’s demand to halt all digital asset trading activities — with Coinbase offering more than 200 tokens — would have brought “the end of the crypto industry in the US.”
“They came back to us, and they said . . . we believe every asset other than Bitcoin is a security. And, we said, well how are you coming to that conclusion, because that’s not our interpretation of the law. And they said, we’re not going to explain it to you, you need to delist every asset other than Bitcoin.”
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told FT.
The report suggests that the SEC took legal action against the exchange for offering the 13 cryptocurrencies the agency identifies as securities.
The 40-year-old CEO says Coinbase’s choice was rather easy for not delisting the assets. “It kind of made it an easy choice … let’s go to the court and find out what the court says,” Armstrong added.
