Legal experts state that the SEC’s Binance and Coinbase lawsuits cast doubt on the future of listed tokens.
Legal experts told CoinDesk that the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuits filed last week against the two largest cryptocurrency exchanges by market volume will probably have a chilling effect on the 19 tokens mentioned in the filings, possibly forcing them to relocate their businesses to other regions of the world.
However, the experts caution that the whole impact is still unknown. In the meantime, all but one of the native cryptocurrencies from some of the most well-known protocols in the market have seen their prices decline by double digits in the last week.
Sean Farrell, head of digital asset analysis at analytics company FundStrat, said: “I’m not sure the lawsuits are a surprise to anyone following the SEC’s current playbook. They want to stifle the onramps with expensive legal burdens so that everyone moves overseas.”
The SEC charged Binance and Coinbase last week with, among other things, distributing unregistered securities to the public. The lawsuits bring to light longstanding concerns about whether cryptocurrencies are a security, commodity, or something else entirely. Investments that can be traded and used as a source of funding are called securities.
