SEC won’t claim SOL, MATIC and other tokens are securities in Binance lawsuit
According to the Tuesday court documents, the SEC has 30 days to formally file the amendment
Binance and Adobe stock modified by Blockworks
The Securities and Exchange Commission says it’ll amend its complaint against Binance and its US subsidiaries to remove its allegations against “third party crypto asset securities” which include SOL, MATIC and ADA.
The amendment, which has not yet been formally filed, wouldn’t force a court to rule on the “sufficiency of the allegations as to those tokens at this time.” According to the Tuesday court documents, the SEC has 30 days to formally file the amendment.
In the original suit — which was filed in June of last year — the SEC labeled a total of 10 tokens as securities. Aside from the aforementioned three, the SEC also targeted Filecoin’s token, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS and COTI.
Read more: SEC seeks to regulate ETH as a security, Consensys alleges in lawsuit
“As these well-pled allegations demonstrate, issuers, developers and promoters promised to and then did undertake significant managerial and entrepreneurial efforts with respect to their tokens and ecosystems before and well after the initial sales, after the assets were available on the Binance Platforms, and to the present day,” the SEC argued in a November filing late last year.
Despite the amendment, the SEC and Binance remain at odds over the scheduling. Lawyers representing Binance said it’s “premature and unreasonable” to plan for discovery until both partied have filed and responded to the amendment filing.
Read more: SEC labels 10 tokens securities in Binance lawsuit
The SEC also claimed that Binance’s own tokens, BNB and stablecoin BUSD, were securities. The regulator wouldn’t be dropping their allegations against either of those in this particular amendment.
Notably, the allegations against the tokens had some ripple effects across the ecosystem. Some, like MATIC, endured short-term volatility following the filing. Robinhood, in another case, dropped support for ADA, MATIC and SOL because of the allegations.
At the time, Robinhood said that the lawsuits — the SEC had similar allegations against Coinbase in a separate lawsuit, and named some of the same tokens — against both exchanges “introduced a cloud of uncertainty” that led to its decision to remove support.
The SEC has not, however, said it will file for a similar amendment in its case against Coinbase.
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