
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Wednesday that it was charging Justin Sun, the founder of TRON Foundation and owner of BitTorrent, and a slew of celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, for releasing and shilling for, respectively, the cryptocurrencies Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT).
The federal regulator said in a statement that Sun's release and sale of TRX and BTT was akin to selling unregistered securities and alleged that he also manipulated markets for the tokens through wash trading—or falsely inflating the trading volume of an asset.