On May 8, 12 states led by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), opposing its recently proposed rule to give the commission the authority to regulate non-securities, including cryptocurrencies.
While the current rules give the SEC the authority to regulate investment advisors who hold a client’s
On March 9, New York Attorney General Letisha James filed a complaint against leading cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin, alleging violations of the Martin Act, which prevents security sales fraud. AG James claimed that Ethereum — the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization — is a security in the first regulator-initiated court claim.
AG James’ complaint alleged that
On January 5, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Celsius founder and former CEO Alex Mashinsky for making repeated misrepresentations about the company’s financial products and asset holdings to investors. AG James describes the now bankrupt crypto-lending platform Celsius as “a cryptocurrency lending platform where investors could deposit their cryptocurrency in return for promises
A lawsuit stemming from the collapse of multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange FTX seeks to recover a billion dollars from FTX’s founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, along with 11 paid endorsers, including Tom Brady, Naomi Osaka, Kevin O’Leary, Gisele Bündchen, Larry David, and Steph Curry. The plaintiffs allege the defendants were involved in a
On April 28, bipartisan lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation, allowing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to oversee cryptocurrency spot markets. The legislation intends to create a framework to fill the regulatory gaps between the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) digital asset marketplace and related regimes.
On May 4, following in the footsteps of President Biden’s recent executive order (Federal EO), California Governor Gavin Newsom issued his own blockchain-related executive order (CA EO), making California the first among the states to endorse a proactive, harmonized approach to regulate blockchain technology. The CA EO assesses how existing state and public institutions may
On April 28, the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (the J5), a global joint operational taxation group consisting of Australia, Canada, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States, issued an intelligence bulletin (Bulletin), enumerating its perceived dangers of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
NFTs, ERC-20, and Fungibility
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are similar in the sense that
On April 6, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) released a draft of his proposed stablecoin legislation titled, Stablecoin Transparency of Reserves and Uniform Safe Transactions Act, or the Stablecoin TRUST Act. Toomey, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, has been a vocal proponent of blockchain innovation, and his recent bill calls for a deft
On March 31, a New York federal court dismissed a proposed securities class-action lawsuit filed against Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The lawsuit, one of a host of similar actions brought against cryptocurrency exchanges in 2020, was filed by token buyers who purchased cryptocurrency on Binance’s platform.
The plaintiffs asserted that Binance had violated
On April 7, in front of American University’s Kogod School of Business Center for Innovation, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen addressed the Biden administration’s forthcoming legislative approach to digital assets, as we discussed here, as well as the digitization of the American economy, which Yellen assessed through the lens of five lessons she