US court allows SEC to continue lawsuit against Binance
Even though Binance has settled and paid fines to the US Department of Justice and CFTC, the SEC has not let go of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.
On June 28 (US time), Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia Court (Washington, USA) issued a ruling allowing the US Securities Commission (SEC)'s lawsuit targeting the cryptocurrency exchange to continue. Binance was accused of being a stock broker.
Accordingly, the court held that the SEC's charges against Binance - including the BNB token sale, BNB Vault service and BNB Staking - were securities that were not registered with the SEC and therefore violated the law. .
However, the judge dismissed the claim that secondary market sales of BNB were securities, similar to another court's mid-2023 ruling regarding the SEC v. Ripple case.
Previously, in June 2023, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao for allegedly acting as a broker and providing illegal securities trading services. The commission also used similar arguments in lawsuits against other industry giants such as Coinbase, Kraken and most recently Consensys and the MetaMask wallet yesterday.
The lawsuit also lists a long list of cryptocurrencies that the SEC considers to be securities, with many coins in the top 30 by market capitalization in the crypto market.
Binance in November 2023 reached a settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice and the Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to end the investigation of these two units. Accordingly, the exchange agreed to pay a record fine of 4.3 billion USD, as well as forcing Mr. Zhao to resign as CEO of Binance and serve a 4-month prison sentence for negligence in management work, allowing violations to occur. money laundering on the floor. Mr. Zhao has now begun serving his sentence at a prison in California.
