The chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, just went all in. After years of dithering, Gensler instructed his agency to send Coinbase a Wells Notice—a corporate nastygram that means "knock it off or we're going to sue you." The full contents of the document are not public, but Coinbase suggested on Wednesday that the SEC is coming not just for its staking business—a small but important crypto niche—but that it also objects to the company selling digital tokens, which is the core of its business.
For Gensler, this is a point of no return. He has declared he wants to take down the big dog. For Coinbase, the looming litigation is an existential threat. If the company shutters its staking service and chooses to delist everything that might be a security—recall that Gensler's latest position is that every digital asset save for Bitcoin is a security—then it will have to shut its doors, or else pull up stakes from its native country and decamp to Dubai, Paris, or Hong Kong instead.
