U.S. regulators have been aggressively pursuing enforcement actions against crypto assets and businesses engaged in this industry. Earlier this month, the SEC brought two cases back-to-back against the cryptocurrency exchanges Binance and Coinbase for allegedly breaking American securities laws. The cases succeeded in shaking the entire sector.
The regulator later declared a number of tokens to be securities as a result of the lawsuits. BNB, BUSD, SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS, and COTI were among the victims in the Binance case. The SEC declared SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH, and NEXO to be securities in the Coinbase litigation.
Many repercussions did occur. For instance, on June 27, Robinhood stopped supporting Cardano, MATIC, and Solana. However, the community is eagerly anticipating greater clarification around cryptocurrency regulations.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin recently tweeted about the United States’ policy towards cryptocurrencies by saying,
“I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way. They don’t deserve it.”
Ethereum Shields Itself
However, Ethereum has been able to stay off of regulators’ radar. This was probably related to the Hinman tangent. Internal emails from the former director of corporation finance at the SEC from 2018 made it clear that he did not believe ETH needed to be regulated as a security. That was similar to his notorious speech from the same year. William Hinman had already labelled ETH as a non-security. Its “sufficiently decentralised” blockchain network was the reason for this.
Buterin argues that if Ethereum prevails in the current situation, it wouldn’t be just. The creator of Ethereum clarified,
“If ethereum ends up “winning” through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn’t even a victory.“
The increasingly expanding, centralised world, according to Buterin, “is imposing itself on us,” not other chains, who are “the real competition.” He wished for a “fair outcome” for all deserving projects in this situation.