It’s happening again – the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is setting its target sites on another cryptocurrency operator, using the classification of various assets to claim violations of its monetary policy.
Crypto News BTC reports that the SEC is once again pursuing the question of whether or not an operator is engaged in selling unregulated securities. This time it’s Poloniex, an up and coming exchange with its roots in the type of crypto advances that the global economy has been seeing over the last several years.
“The SEC introduced Monday that ‘Poloniex LLC has agreed to pay greater than $10 million to settle expenses for working an unregistered on-line digital asset alternate,’” writes an admin on the Crypto News BTC site. “From July 2017 by way of November 2019, Poloniex ‘facilitated shopping for and promoting of digital asset securities.’ The SEC defined that the platform was accessible to U.S. buyers, however, Poloniex didn’t register as a nationwide securities alternate and was not exempt from registration. Its failure to take action was a violation of Part 5 of the Trade Act.”
All of this is headache-inducing to the average crypto investor, but there’s an even more chilling and ominous note in a piece that chronicles comments by SEC chair Gary Gensler:
“I think former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said it well when he testified in 2018: ‘To the extent that digital assets like [initial coin offerings, or ICOs] are securities – and I believe every ICO I have seen is a security – we have jurisdiction, and our federal securities laws apply,’” Gensler recently said, according to coverage at Coindesk.
If all coins and tokens are securities, all of them can find themselves at the butt end of the SEC’s sharp stick. This bodes especially ill for Ripple, a company which has been duking it out with the SEC in federal court over its XRP tokens classification for months, but it’s scary for everyone else, too.
We’ve been covering Ripple v. SEC pretty closely, and we know that this type of decision is going to mean big things for the crypto industry as a whole.
If you have crypto related investments and are looking for environments to trade in, it’s to your benefit to know how these laws and rules are coming down, and why.