Four large-cap digital assets cratered in price this week after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) labeled them securities in a pair of lawsuits against high-profile crypto exchanges.
On Monday, the SEC sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao over what the federal agency’s head, Gary Gensler, called “an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.”
The regulator also accuses the top global crypto exchange of engaging in unregistered offers and sales of “crypto asset securities,” including Binance’s native token, BNB.
BNB is trading at $264.64 at time of writing. The fourth-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down more than 13% in the past seven days.
In the lawsuit, the SEC also listed numerous other tokens it considers “crypto asset securities,” including the Ethereum (ETH) competitors Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL), and the blockchain scaling solution Polygon (MATIC).
ADA is trading at $0.325 at time of writing and is down more than 11% in the past week. SOL is trading at $19.00 at time of writing and is down 8%. MATIC is trading at $0.784 and is down nearly 12%.
The SEC also filed a lawsuit against top US crypto exchange Coinbase on Tuesday, accusing the company of operating as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency. That lawsuit also labeled Cardano, Solana and Polygon as securities.
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