Did the SEC Really Serve Subpoenas at Mainnet?

The Breakdown

Nathaniel Whittemore

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on “The Breakdown,” NLW looks at reports from Messari’s Mainnet conference that the Securities and Exchange Commission served one of the speakers with a subpoena right before a panel. He discusses: The growing tension between securities regulators and crypto lending and interest programs Why Coinbase backed down from its fight with the SEC about its upcoming Lend product The non-news from today’s Gary Gensler webinar OFAC’s first sanctions against a crypto exchange. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1438693620?at=1000lSDb Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/538vuul1PuorUDwgkC8JWF?si=ddSvD-HST2e_E7wgxcjtfQ Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ubHdjcnlwdG8ubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M= Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW “The Breakdown” is written, produced by and features NLW, with editing by Rob Mitchell and additional production support by Eleanor Pahl. Adam B. Levine is our executive producer and our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach. The music you heard today behind our sponsor is “Only in Time” by Abloom. Image credit: Lyubchik Prokopchuk/iStock/Getty Images Plus, modified by CoinDesk.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.
0:09.0	It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.
0:16.3	The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.
0:22.7	What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, September 21st, and today we're talking about an SEC
0:29.6	shakedown at Mainnet. I've been in crypto full-time for a long time now, but this one was
0:36.3	even surprising for me. To get into this,
0:39.9	I want to go back to some of the things I've mentioned in the last few weeks. And let's discuss
0:43.8	first the issue that securities regulators are clearly having with interest-bearing crypto accounts.
0:50.3	A couple months ago, Block 5 came into regulatory prominence when Texas, New Jersey, Alabama, and a number of others basically said that they were operating unregistered securities in their states, and they needed to stop that.
1:02.9	At first, Block 5 struck a tone that was, if not conciliatory in the sense that they made clear that they believed their products were not, in fact, securities, then at least the tone was that they were willing to work with these regulators.
1:15.2	New Jersey suspended their order a number of times. It seemed like there was productive
1:18.9	conversations happening. But then at last week's Salt Conference, BlockFi CEO, Zach Prince,
1:24.8	effectively said, look, the SEC is going to need to come in and say whether
1:28.7	these things are securities or not, because we're not going to make our policy based on the
1:32.5	policies of individual states. At the end of last week, this story got more complex, as some of those
1:39.1	same state regulators, Texas, New Jersey, Alabama, went after Celsius for its similar interest-bearing products.
1:46.7	Obviously, however, those things being as big as they are, the real big moment in this whole
1:51.7	securities regulators, interest accounts, crypto-yield product conversation, came with Brian Armstrong,
1:58.6	the CEO of Coinbase's thread from September 7th.
2:02.5	He wrote some really sketchy behavior coming out of the SEC recently.
2:06.9	Storytime.
2:07.9	Millions of crypto holders have been earning yield on their assets over the last few years.
	...

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