A late Friday news dump is rarely good news, and the drafting and judicial approval of a consent agreement between the SEC and Binance.US definitely didn’t favor the exchange. At least one former SEC official said it was as bad as losing the overall case.
News broke overnight that Binance.US and the Securities and Exchange Commission had entered into a consent order addressing the SEC’s earlier emergency request to freeze the assets of the American affiliate of the global exchange.
The agreement comes with a lot of homework for Binance.US, from providing monthly expense reports to turning over lists of all accounts and wallets and transactions dating back to December. It also calls for “expedited discovery,” allowing only 45 days for Binance.US to produce the records and three months for the SEC to conduct its investigation.
The agreement seemed to prompt former chief of the SEC Office of Internet Enforcement John Reed Stark to reach for a thesaurus. He called the deal both “burdensome, awkward, [and] inconvenient” and “unprecedented, exhaustive, and onerous.”
As far as Stark is concerned, the consent agreement is so bad, it’s as if Binance had already lost the upcoming civil trial.
“The SEC has been given a role akin to a Binance independent consultant, a remedy often granted to the SEC after the SEC prevails in an enforcement action,” he concluded.
🪙 Coin of the moment
Thanks to a merciful meeting of the Fed this week, where the financial markets regulator paused its ongoing rate-hike campaign, crypto prices held steady or even crept higher leading into the weekend.
Uniswap (UNI) was the top gainer in the Top 20, rising 12.4% to $4.54 today. The coin and blockchain made waves this week with the announcement of its upcoming fourth version, which will be made open source to allow developers greater flexibility in building new tools. Some developers, however, have taken issue with the type of open-source license Uniswap has chosen to use.
“The possibilities are pretty endless,” Sara Reynolds, lead smart contract engineer at Uniswap Labs, told Decrypt. “There are directions the community can take this that we aren’t even aware of at the moment.”
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With H.R. Giger’s original “Alien” statue on full display at this year’s NFC Lisbon, Particle CEO Harold Eytan told Decrypt that owning an NFT-ified slice of the piece isn’t just for fans of the iconic creature and movie series but also for fine art collectors. Interested in owning a piece? Be prepared to cough up half an ETH for one of the 500 tranches of the digitized sculpture.
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🗞️ Read Around the Web
Stories we recommend from outside Decrypt this week.
– Reddit CEO Praises Elon Musk’s Cost-Cutting as Protests Rock the Platform (NBC News)
– Four-Week-Old AI Start-Up Raises Record €105mn in European Push (Financial Times)
CCO and co-founder of Collab.Land Anjali Young explained at this year’s NFC Lisbon the origins of the crypto community tool kit, which industry niches are turning to its suite of products, and what’s next for the project since its token distribution event last February.
