Author: Steven Ehrlich Source: unchainedcrypto Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

If someone had doubted before whether the Trump White House would break with President Biden's hostile attitude towards the cryptocurrency industry, then it must have disappeared today.

This morning, Coinbase announced an agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which sued the company in June 2023 on the grounds that it, including many other allegations, operated as an unlicensed national stock exchange, and the lawsuit will be completely dismissed. Coinbase does not have to pay any fines or change any aspect of its business. The case will be "prejudgmented" and this means that the lawsuit cannot be filed again in the future.

"We are not trying to pay any fines," said Paul Greval, chief legal officer of Coinbase. "But if they [SEC] want to correct the error, admit it is a huge mistake, and revoke the case, we won't stop it. That's what ends up happening today."

The actual revocation will not take place until next Thursday, when three current commissioners, Mark Uyeda, Hester Pierce and Caroline Crenshaw, will vote on the proposal. Greval said Coinbase decided to make the news public today because it will submit Form 8-K to the SEC, so information will go into the public domain anyway. These forms are filed by companies registered with the SEC to publish important events that shareholders should be aware of. When asked about possible revocation, the SEC declined to comment.

The case was “biased out” rather than reaching a settlement with even a symbolic fine, which was a huge victory for the industry and proved its view that the SEC’s position was unfair.

"They sued us without any legal basis. They sued us without telling us what the rules are," Greval said. "They imposed a tax on Coinbase and other industries that was actually a tax on U.S. innovation, causing hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions of dollars in losses."

The next question is, SWhat happens to EC’s similar lawsuits filed against Coinbase’s competitors such as Binance and Kraken and leading decentralized exchange Uniswap. Greval hopes these companies will see similar solutions in the near term. “The SEC and other parties will eventually address this,” he said. “But we think we have provided a template or model for others, and I believe we will soon see peace across the industry.”

A former SEC official familiar with these cases agreed while communicating with Unchained on anonymity that a similar revocation was possible. "I think if they drop this case, we will see all other cases being dropped in the coming days. I don't understand how they can continue these cases."

The former official pointed out that Binance's case could be an exception because the lawsuit (also filed in June 2023) contains allegations of fraud and transaction manipulation, and there are no such allegations in other complaints. The former official noted that the SEC may be reluctant to give up the allegations because they could lead to actual customer harm. On February 13, a federal judge approved a joint request from Binance and the SEC to allow the case to be suspended for 60 days, citing a framework being developed that could provide greater regulatory clarity to the industry.

Although this case is widely celebrated in the cryptocurrency circle, there are still many important issues that need to be resolved to make the industry more trustworthy and transparent. The revocation has no other effect than making it clear that the SEC will allow secondary sales of tokens on exchanges such as Coinbase and creates breathing space for Congress’ regulators and lawmakers to draft rules governing the industry. Congress is developing legislation to create rules for the $200 billion stablecoin industry and a market infrastructure bill to regulate spot cryptocurrency transactions and to define power boundaries between the SEC and its sister institution, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

Commissioner Hester Pierce is leading a newly formed agency-wide cryptocurrency working group “to develop a comprehensive and clear regulatory framework for crypto assets.” In a February 4 blog post, Pierce made it clear that the priority is to eliminate information asymmetry between project insiders and the wider investment public, as demonstrated by the recent LIBRA Meme Coin’s fiasco.

Pearce wrote: "WorkThe Group is also considering whether it is possible to recommend that the Committee take action to provide certain specific information to the issuing entity or other entities willing to assume responsibility, keep that information updated, and agree to provide interim forward-looking and retroactive relief for tokens or token offerings without questioning the Committee's jurisdiction in alleged fraud cases related to asset purchases and sales. ”

Former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Christopher Giancarlo believes that now may be the best time to completely upend the way information disclosure is disclosed in various industries. He is an advisor to Bluprynt, which is using blockchain technology to instantly distribute on-chain market data and disclosures from tokenized shares in Coinbase stocks to oil production.

"Depending on whether the asset is a securities or a commodity, you will have a sliding spectrum of information centralized or decentralized information," Giancarlo said. "We will have to take a more comprehensive view, but the technology will provide us with the tools necessary to balance the entire scale of information from fully decentralized commodities to highly centralized ICOs. ”

To allow cryptocurrencies to really turn a new page, this revocation should be seen as a catalyst to accelerate all of these conversations. But for now, Greval hopes that the SEC will continue to look for real bad actors in the field. “The SEC and other institutions should focus on fraud. Fraud has no place in any market, and cryptocurrencies are no exception. Unfortunately, Gary Jensler decided to spend millions of dollars in taxpayer funds on various other odysseys, romps and detours that weren't related to fraud. ”