The crypto industry is running out of ground to stand on, particularly in the US.
Since the price of Bitcoin tumbled off its exuberant $69,000 high in late 2021, the bear market in digital assets has often been described as a “crypto winter.” That’s not bleak enough to capture what’s happened. In quick succession, crypto has seen financial contagions, multiple cases of alleged fraud and outright theft, the collapse of several trading and lending platforms, and the evaporation of about $1.8 trillion in market value across all coins. Celebrity endorsers have been embarrassed and in some cases fined, trend-chasing venture capitalists have pivoted their attention to chatbots, and the letters “FTX” have been taken down from Miami’s basketball arena. And millions of ordinary investors have been badly burned.
Through it all, regulators including the US Securities and Exchange Commission have steadily ramped up enforcement actions, with hints of more to come. Many crypto businesses have complained about a lack of clarity concerning what rules, if any, they were supposed to follow. In early June the SEC filed a pair of lawsuits that remove any ambiguity about where the watchdog stands: The agency contends that many of the business practices people in crypto took for granted during the boom years are not legal in the US.
