> “We allege that Coinbase, despite being subject to the securities laws, commingled and unlawfully offered exchange, broker-dealer, and clearinghouse functions,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “In other parts of our securities markets, these functions are separate. Coinbase’s alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC. Further, as we allege, Coinbase never registered its staking-as-a-service program as required by the securities laws, again depriving investors of critical disclosure and other protections.”

Seems rather straightforward to me given this press release.

Quit comingling functions. Bring your exchange to proper legal structure in the USA. Split the broker-dealer and clearinghouse functions off.

And quit operating Coinbase Earn, which is an obvious security by any other name. Either that, or properly register Coinbase Earn as a security before offering it as a product to the public. If you are to keep operating Coinbase Earn, then bring it under security regulations, which means reporting upon your assets and such under whatever filing system you want (probably bonds?)

Its... not even that hard to read the SEC complaint. Just read it, the complaint is right there for all of us to see.

The rules always were there. Just that the SEC was willing to turn a blind eye for years on this issue.

The reason why SEC couldn't ignore this anymore is FTX and SBF. It became clear that cryptocoins are full of fraudsters, and the cryptocoin community has absolutely no way to differentiate from the fraudsters and the legitimate groups.

SEC is simply not in a position to keep turning a blind eye to the cryptocoin world after $10,000,000,000+ was stolen by FTX and SBF.