“Regardless of whether the Commission determines to undertake the rulemaking sought by Coinbase, a decision the Commission has yet to make, Coinbase – like everyone else – is bound by existing law,” the SEC filing said. “And Coinbase is free to vigorously assert its position that it has not violated that law in the current enforcement action.” Source
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) extended the comments period for its proposal to amend Rule 3b-16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 ended June 13. The Blockchain Association and Republican members of the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services filed last-minute comments. The amendments proposal, which runs for hundreds of pages, was released in January 2022. It did not mention digital assets. Another lengthy document was released when the comment period was reopened. It did address digital asset platforms. The amendments could profoundly impact the…
Binance, Binance.US and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao published their first responses to the SEC’s lawsuit against them and, taken at face value, the stakes appear to be dire. But by the end of the day, we may get a better sense of how the case is proceeding and what a judge thinks about the arguments so far. Source
However, DeFi protocols “intuitively possess none of the defining hallmarks of stock exchanges,” according to the DeFi Education Fund’s letter. “Beyond DeFi, the commission’s proposal has no logical limit and would sweep third-party and utility service providers who contract with exchange providers into the exchange regulatory regime.” Source
Nearly $35 million worth of various tokens were stolen from Atomic Wallet, a centralized storage and wallet service, on June 3. These tokens include bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), tether (USDT), dogecoin (DOGE), litecoin (LTC), BNB coin (BNB) and Polygon’s MATIC. Source
All but a couple of the 19 tokens mentioned in the suit, which accuses the exchange giants of violating securities laws, have sunk by double-digits over the past seven days with CHZ and SAND, the tokens of the Chiliz network and The Sandbox metaverse game, falling more than 28% and 27%, respectively and ADA, the native crypto of the Cardana blockchain, dropping over 21% as investors looked fretfully at an an increasingly uncertain U.S. regulatory environment in which cryptos have yet to receive a designation as security, commodity or otherwise.…
Binance operates an independent entity dubbed Binance Nigeria Limited similar to the United States entity that was also deemed illegal earlier last week. Cryptocurrency exchanges around the world have found themselves at loggerheads with several global regulators for offering digital assets without proper registrations. In the latest developments, both the Nigerian and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have intensified the crackdown on unregistered crypto exchanges. Reportedly, Binance Nigeria has been operating a crypto exchange without the proper regulatory approvals required for securities. This comes after the Nigerian…
While data suggests that crypto assets have been flowing out of centralized exchanges at an accelerated pace over the last week, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao argues it may not be as bad as it appears. Leading analytics platforms such as Nansen and DeFiLlama have all measured increased exchange outflows from Binance over the past seven days after news of the SEC lawsuit against the firm hit the airwaves. According to Nansen, there has been a net outflow of $2.36 billion from Binance over the past seven days along with $123.7 million…
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is charging two Russian nationals for their alleged involvement in the infamous hack of defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox. In a new press release, the DOJ says that it is charging two Russian citizens – 43-year-old Alexey Bilyuchenko and 29-year-old Aleksandr Verner – for allegedly conspiring to launder hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin (BTC) hacked from Mt. Gox. Furthermore, Bilyuchenko is also charged with conspiring to operate BTC-e, a crypto exchange allegedly linked to money laundering and the Mt. Gox hack, from 2011 to…
Fully 300,000 of those coins went to BTC-e, another now-defunct crypto exchange. BTC-e was shut down by the FBI in 2017, and the exchange’s alleged operator, Russian national Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece and later extradited to the U.S. to face charges for “computer intrusions and hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identity theft schemes, corrupt public officials and narcotics distribution rings.” Source