I suppose that is more honest than saying she made a direct comparison between Coinbase and heroin dealers.

Not really because she mentions SEC doesn't evaluate the businesses themselves when they apply for an IPO.

Coinbase doing an IPO (and them using this argument against SEC) is not being compared to heroin.

The comparison is that Coinbase would go to SEC and ask "hey we want to sell these bitcoin futures and securities, is it okay?" and SEC says "nope it isn't" and Coinbase just says "okay we'll sell it anyways", which is exactly what they did.

They knew the law existed and applied to crypto, yet they decided to go against it anyways because they thought they could get away with interpretation shenaningans.

The fact that the listing was approved is immaterial to whether the business is breaking securities law. The SEC is not required to verify that you are running a legitimate business before allowing you to IPO. They are only required to confirm that the data in the forms you mentioned represents your business correctly.

The Coinbase S1 admits this explicitly: they explicitly list the risk of their business model being contested by the SEC later in the document that the SEC approved.

> a completely flawed comparison, not because of the matter but because unlike the hypothetical heroin case, the SEC did approve the listing

The SEC doesn't approve IPOs. In bold among Coinbase's S-1's cover pages: "Neither the Securities and Exchange Commission nor any other regulatory body has approved or disapproved of these securities or passed upon the accuracy or adequacy of this prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offense."

https://investor.coinbase.com/financials/sec-filings/sec-fil...

Nobody reads those boring SEC filings if they can have media reports about companies PR pieces instead.