#49 Inside the SEC's War on Crypto with Lewis Cohen and Nikhilesh De

Jun 15, 2023

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Like it or not, the US is still the most important crypto market in the world, and if you’re a professional operating in this industry you need to be paying serious attention to what’s happening there.

So to help you do that, Antonio and I invited two experts from the US to help us synthesize what’s going on with these SEC lawsuits and understand how observers in markets like Brazil should be interpreting these events.

Lewis Cohen is an honorary Brazilian through marriage and is the co-founder of DLx Law. He’s long been one of the leading voices at the intersection of crypto and securities law in the US, and he recently co-authored the 180 page treatise The Ineluctable Modality of Securities Law: Why Fungible Crypto Assets Are not Securities. Follow him on Twitter at @NYcryptolawyer
Nikhilesh De is a former colleague of mine at CoinDesk, where he overseas all of the outlet’s policy and regulatory coverage. He’s been covering US regulatory issues for almost five years now and has more institutional knowledge on these issues than probably any other journalist on the planet. Follow him on Twitter at @nikhileshde

We run through the madness of the last couple of weeks in the US, including:

June 2 - the McHenry-Thompson draft legislation was introduced. The bill would provide market structure reform specific to crypto assets - including defining clearer roles for the SEC and CFTC with respect to the asset class
June 5 - SEC filed 13 charges against Binance (and CZ) accusing it of operating as an unregulated securities exchange, commingling customer funds, misrepresenting trading controls on Binance.US and a bunch of other bad stuff
June 6 - SEC sues Coinbase accusing it of operating as an unregistered securities exchange in the US. The agency specifically named a plethora of crypto assets as securities in the lawsuit
June 7 - Binance fights back claiming that SEC Chair Gary Gensler offered to be an advisor to Binance and CZ in 2019
June 12 - Rep. Warren Davidson introduces the “SEC Stablization Act” that seeks to fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler
June 13 - the infamous Bill Hinman emails related to his 2018 speech about how Ethereum was “sufficiently decentralized” are released as part of the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit
June 13 - a federal judge rejects the SEC’s petition to freeze Binance.US’s assets

We break down these events and assess just how bad the situation is, the road ahead for crypto in the US and the outlook for much-needed crypto legislation, and implications for other markets like Brazil.