The fall of FTX has clearly changed the mindset of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) towards the crypto industry. In the roughly six-month period following FTX’s implosion, the number of to attack of the US financial watchdog increased by 183 percent.
From 6 to 17
In the six months before FTX’s collapse, the SEC only 6 enforcement actions against the industry, up from 17 in the first six months after the stock market implosion. It is therefore clear that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and his team have been awakened by the collapse of the great FTX.
Now FTX was also a gigantic example of a practice that we have seen before in the crypto world. Money does strange things to people and unfortunately in this case FTX’s directors decided to play with users’ funds.
Something like this goes well, of course, until it goes wrong and then it often immediately goes wrong. In this case, that caused a hole of several billions in FTX’s budget, which the exchange platform could no longer recover.
That the SEC no longer trusts things completely can be clearly seen in the above zipper with statistics. Where it used to be a sporadic action, the SEC now intervenes really hard on a regular basis.
Binance and Coinbase
This week, the regulator surprisingly came out with lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance. In particular, the case against Binance came up out of nowhere. After all, Coinbase already received a so-called Wells Notice in March, with which the SEC essentially says it plans to file a lawsuit.
In both cases, the SEC believes that the exchange platforms are unregulated stock exchanges. This means that they do not comply with the rules by making unregistered securities tradable and do not have the proper licenses to list securities themselves.
All in all, this means that both exchange platforms face quite a legal battle in the coming years. A fight that can also have consequences for a large number of projects within the industry. In that respect, these are two things to keep an eye on.