Coinbase offers a fiery response to the SEC’s threat of enforcement action | Crypto Craft

  • Coinbase offers a fiery response to the SEC’s threat of enforcement action

    From cnbc.com

    Crypto exchange Coinbase offered a fiery response on Thursday to last month’s Wells notice from the SEC, telling the federal regulator that an enforcement action against the crypto exchange would pose “major programmatic risks” to the SEC that would “fail on the merits.” “Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities,” the company’s response said. The analysis SEC did staffers to justify an enforcement action “appears to rest on superficial and incorrect analogies to products and services offered by others,” Coinbase wrote in a blog post from chief legal officer Paul Grewal. ... (full story)

Added at 1:56pm

  • Wells submission on behalf of Coinbase Global, Inc. and Coinbase, Inc.

    From assets.ctfassets.net Story is in PDF Format

    In April 2021—two years ago this month—this Commission declared effective Coinbase Global, Inc.’s registration statement, allowing Coinbase’s shares to be sold to millions of investors the Commission is mission-bound to protect, including retail investors, mutual funds, and pension funds. The Commission did so after years of discussions with Coinbase and a months-long process of extensive review and comment on its registration statement. Those processes focused on all aspects of Coinbase’s business, including its listing and custodying of digital assets, provision of trading and staking services, ... (full story)

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Goat
Apr 27, 2023 8:20pm — Edited
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Coinbase wants so bad for cryptocurrency to be treated as a new asset class. I guess that makes sense coming from the crypto industry, but that's not where the SEC is coming from. To the SEC, and to those who understand financial regulation, crypto is just another asset that fits neatly in the existing asset classes. Some cryptos are commodities, others are securities. It's plain as day.

Coinbase has been nagging regulators for clear regulation, and they've been told over and over that crypto falls into the existing framework. That's a crystal-clear answer, but not the one that Coinbase wants to hear, so they pretend it doesn't make sense and keep on nagging.

This is a battle between delusion and reality. Sometimes delusion wins, but it's rare. In this case it seems impossible for Coinbase to win, because if they do it means the entire asset-class structure needs to be refactored. In other words, if Coinbase is right, the way we've been organizing assets for the past hundred years is wrong.

I guess what I'm predicting is that Coinbase will lose this case.
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