The announcement that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had filed a lawsuit against Binance, Binance US, and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) may have come as a surprise to the cryptocurrency community, but the SEC’s interest in the exchange was already well known. Reactions to the lawsuit were mixed.
Zhao Changpeng claimed in a tweet on the morning of June 5 that “the media got the information before us,” before the company saw the SEC’s complaint. Binance’s two statements show their emergency response behind the scenes.
Binance called the lawsuit "disappointing" in a blog post, highlighting the SEC's failure to provide clear guidance and direction and its impact on financial innovation. A later statement released via email more closely involved the legal issues, claiming a lack of due process and promising a vigorous defense.
In response to the allegations, Corey Clipsten, CEO of financial firm Swan Bitcoin, said that the SEC’s lawsuit should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the industry. He said in a statement:
“These practices by Binance were largely an open secret, so no one working in the industry should be surprised by these allegations.”
The SEC has repeatedly claimed that almost all cryptocurrencies are securities, so this list of 10 tokens is also revealing. Some of them are well-known, such as Filecoin (FIL) being identified as a security. Algorand (ALGO) has also been mentioned separately before.
