Yesterday took the charge of the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seized the front page of the crypto news against crypto exchange Binance. In total, the US regulator has filed 13 charges against the largest crypto exchange in the world and its CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). One of the allegations is that the stock market has a number of unregistered securities, or securities, to the general public. In addition to its own BNB token (BNB) and Binance USD (BUSD) stablecoin, a multitude of other altcoins are also labeled as securities.
SEC categorizes cardano, BNB and more as securities
Many within the crypto community will be familiar with the ongoing lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple. In late 2020, Ripple was accused of selling its XRP tokens as securities without proper licensing. Now the financial watchdog seems to have started the hunt for other cryptocurrencies. According to the SEC, BNB, BUSD, cardano (ADA), polygon (MATIC), solana (SOL), filecoin (FIL), cosmos (ATOM), the sandbox (SAND), decentraland (MANA), algorand (ALGO), axie infinity (AXS) and coti (COTI) under the securities category.
The SEC accused Binance US of providing trading for securities such as BNB, BUSD, SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI. https://t.co/bGOZdbccuh pic.twitter.com/3pzzjAo9xl
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) June 5, 2023
Bitcoin (BTC) is currently down nearly 6 percent over the past day, but altcoins are currently bleeding harder. Most altcoins listed by the SEC are currently down 10 percent from a day earlier.
Surprisingly, the SEC did not name ethereum (ETH) as a security in the indictment. In April, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler declined to say in a nearly five-hour hearing whether ETH should be considered a security.
However, the SEC stressed that the allegation is not limited to this particular list.
At the end of February, Gensler indicated in an interview that he believes that all cryptocurrencies except bitcoin should be seen as securities. At the time, the SEC chairman received a mountain of criticism because the SEC does not have the authority to label certain assets as ‘security’.
Charge against Binance and CEO CZ
The entire laundry list of charges also consists of offering the Simple Earn and BNB Vault products and the staking program. In addition, the exchange would have failed to deny US investors access to Binance.com and would function as an unregistered exchange and broker.
The SEC also alleges that CZ secretly “controls” Binance.US, the US arm of Binance, and that an entity owned by CZ inflated the trading volume of this US arm.
