U.S. Chamber of Commerce Lines Up in Support of Coinbase Amid Exchange’s Push for Regulatory Clarity From SEC

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is supporting Coinbase’s efforts to secure regulatory guidance on crypto assets from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The top US crypto exchange filed a motion in court in April to compel the SEC to respond to an earlier petition from the company requesting guidance for the digital asset industry.

Coinbase first submitted the petition for rulemaking last July but has yet to hear a “yes” or “no” answer to the request.

This week, the Chamber of Commerce submitted a legal document known as an amicus brief outlining its support of Coinbase’s petition. The Chamber says the SEC’s regulatory approach to crypto has subverted the “basic tenets of due process, administrative law, and good governance.”

“As it stands today, nobody knows for certain which digital assets, if any, are ‘securities’ under federal law. That is no small question. It has immense implications for every person involved in the $1 trillion digital-asset economy, and it is the threshold regulatory question from which all others flow.

But remarkably, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – despite proclaiming itself the primary regulator of digital assets – has refused to resolve this threshold question. The Commission has instead offered a series of one-off enforcement actions, supplemented by public speeches and other statements that one commissioner broadly described as ‘confusing, unhelpful, and inconsistent.’ And it has refused to engage in any rulemaking or other systematic process to explain what its claimed authority means.”

In March, the SEC sent a Wells Notice to Coinbase, which said they had made a “preliminary determination” to recommend filing an enforcement action against the crypto exchange for allegedly violating securities laws.

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