The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed 13 charges against Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao. 🍿
The full complaint from regulators is a document of 136 pageswhich appears to be absolutely full of juice about the world’s largest crypto exchange.
This is the SEC’s chosen top line:
The costs include serving unregistered exchanges, broker-dealers and clearing houses; misrepresent trading controls and oversight on the Binance.US platform; and the unregistered offering and selling of securities.
There are a lot of things to say at this point, but maybe we should just repeat this comment on page 64 from an unnamed employee of BAM Trading, Binance’s operator: “Yikes”.
There’s also this fantastic, and completely unnecessary, “(Emphasis added.)”:
You can read the full criminal record here. If you see something nice, let us know in the comments.
Update 17:53 BST: Binance has responded. Quote:
While we take the SEC’s allegations seriously, they should not be the subject of an SEC enforcement action, let alone on an emergency basis. We intend to vigorously defend our platform. Unfortunately, the SEC’s refusal to engage with us in a productive manner is just one example of the Commission’s misguided and deliberate refusal to provide much-needed clarity and guidance to the digital asset industry.
Update 17:55 BST: You get bags and t shirts:
Update 19:50 BST: We missed this before. No dear, the media doesn’t get fed up with SEC stuff early on (if this kind of incompetent shitpost isn’t proof enough):
