BTC vs SEC

Supreme Court Case could slap down the SEC…

Cryp­to mar­kets could see a sub­stan­tial gain as the Supreme court has appeared to take steps to reduce the clear abuse of laws that may not be as clear as they should have been when it comes to the recent use by the SEC of try­ing to change the way laws were made to file law­suits against cryp­to com­pa­nies.

The SEC has been fil­ing law­suits seek­ing to rede­fine the way laws were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten this alleged­ly has cre­at­ed prob­lems for what is seen as incor­rect behav­ior.

Cody Car­bone, TDC Chief Pol­i­cy Offi­cer, opined:

This deci­sion is a game chang­er for the cryp­to indus­try. It promis­es a future where reg­u­la­tions are more pre­dictable and ground­ed in clear leg­isla­tive intent, rather than shift­ing inter­pre­ta­tions by reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies and unelect­ed pol­i­cy lead­ers.

What might this mean for the SEC and its law­suits claim­ing cryp­to com­pa­nies are attempt­ing to sell secu­ri­ties?

What we have here is a sit­u­a­tion where there is no clear def­i­n­i­tion about cryp­to in terms of a secu­ri­ty.

The SEC wants to argue that cryp­to is a secu­ri­ty but they have a prob­lem and that prob­lem is that as the law is writ­ten secu­ri­ties are a defin­able class of invest­ments that tra­di­tion­al­ly are clear­ly defin­able because they are most­ly stocks that meet cri­te­ria, defined in law.

The real prob­lem here and now is that dig­i­tal assets are not cur­rent­ly includ­ed in law as a secu­ri­ty.

They are in fact not a secu­ri­ty at least con­gress at this point has not issued new laws defin­ing cryp­to as a secu­ri­ty.

The SEC has used Chevron def­er­ence is a prin­ci­ple derived from the Supreme Court case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Nat­ur­al Resources Defence Coun­cil, Inc. (1984). Under this doc­trine, courts defer to a fed­er­al agency’s inter­pre­ta­tion of an ambigu­ous or unclear statute that the agency admin­is­ters, pro­vid­ed that the inter­pre­ta­tion is rea­son­able.

This is a big game chang­er and it is like­ly to cre­ate and trans­late into a seri­ous can of worms for the SEC.

What hap­pens next is some­thing that will be talked about for years in the back rooms of big law firms across the US.

This is the Sec­ond Supreme court deci­sion that appears to lim­it the abuse of laws that have recent­ly been used to cre­ate the effect of law with­out actu­al­ly writ­ing new laws and this is impor­tant because con­gress write law not judges and not gov­ern­ment agen­cies.

Will this change the way that many gov­ern­ment agen­cies do busi­ness?

The short answer is YES !

It is like­ly that there will be a lot more law­suits in the near term but once some of those law­suits are adju­di­cat­ed we can log­i­cal­ly expect some changes in behav­ior.

This is a good thing for com­pa­nies and the aver­age cit­i­zen.

It returns to the peo­ple some mea­sure of an expec­ta­tion of fair­ness.