Brian Armstrong announced that the SEC bureau has directed the Coinbase team to end all trading of altcoins from the Coinbase platform, as all cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities under the purview of the SEC bureau.
Coinbase is a popular US crypto platform. This crypto company is publicly traded on the Nasdaq exchange under the Index COIN. Last month, this company was sued by the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) for allegedly making unregistered securities offerings and illegally operating an unregistered national stock exchange.
On July 31, 2023, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong appeared in a interview with Financial Times (FT). In the interview, Armstrong revealed a brief Coinbase vs SEC story.
Armstrong said the SEC authority ordered the Coinbase exchange to remove all crypto asset trading pairs from the platform, with the exception of Bitcoin, just before the lawsuit. At the time, the SEC bureau clearly said that all crypto assets except Bitcoin were unregistered securities.
In addition, Coinbase’s CEO revealed that the Coinbase team was trying to get information from the SEC on how they investigated these crypto-assets and under what law cryptocurrencies should be treated as unregistered security tokens.
Reportedly, the SEC body has denied providing any information on this matter. The SEC body said we are not going to explain it to you, you have to remove all assets except Bitcoin.
Notably, the Coinbase exchange offers trading for over 150 crypto assets. While the SEC body only listed 13 crypto assets as an unregistered security token on the Coinbase exchange.
During the interview, the CEO of Coinbase indirectly tried to explain that the SEC agency wants to control the industry and probably this independent government agency wants to destroy this innovative industry through forced regulatory action.
In June this year, some people claimed that the US regulators supported the Coinbase exchange while opposing the BinanceUS crypto exchange under similar legal action, showing that Coinbase gets support because of its identity as a US company, but BinanceUS does not receive support because it is a non-US company.
Just before the Coinbase exchange, the BinanceUS exchange was sued by the US SEC. After the legal action, the Binance team has dropped more than 100 crypto asset trading pairs for the platform, but here Coinbase Exchange is confidently offering crypto trading services as it did before the lawsuit, as the Coinbase Exchange always followed rules and regulations to maintain a better relationship between Crypto & US regulation.
Also read: 66.6% of the top global banks support cryptocurrencies