The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is listing three crypto assets that it considers to be commodities.
In a fraud complaint filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Alameda Research, the CFTC says that digital assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Tether (USDT) are commodities.
“A digital asset is anything that can be stored and transmitted electronically and has associated ownership or use rights.
Digital assets include virtual currencies, such as bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), and tether (USDT), which are digital representations of value that function as mediums of exchange, units of account, and/or stores of value.
Certain digital assets are ‘commodities,’ including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), tether (USDT) and others…”
In the fraud complaint, the CFTC alleges that among other things Sam Bankman-Fried and the crypto entities he founded and led, “misappropriated customer funds for their own use and benefit.”
“Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives also took hundreds of millions of dollars in poorly-documented ‘loans’ from Alameda that they used to purchase luxury real estate and property, make political donations, and for other unauthorized uses.”
Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested earlier this week in the Bahamas as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York issued an indictment charging him on one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and campaign finance laws and six counts of fraud.
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