First Look: A Comprehensive Summary of the SEC Suit against Binance.

A special edition of the newsletter, entirely devoted to the new SEC suit against Binance, CZ and related parties.

This newsletter is a little bit of a departure from the norm. Above the fold, I’ll give you a brief overview of what we’re looking at and my key take-a-ways, but below the fold we’ll have detailed, AI-assisted rapid analysis of the lawsuit issued today by the SEC against Binance.

The lawsuit puts together a laundry list of Binance related properties, and names almost all of them in the suit: “Binance Holdings Limited, BAM Trading Services Inc., BAM Management US Holdings Inc., and Changpeng Zhao (CZ), Merit Peak, Sigma Chain, and CoinMarketCap OpCo, LLC.”

The vast majority of this lawsuit has Gary Gensler’s fingerprints all over it, which is to say: we’re not specific about what crypto securities regulations are, but when you’ve violated them, we’re going to bring to bear the entire federal government's weight against you.

Reading between the lines, as someone who’s been targeted by the feds in this way, they’re trying to make a case that because Binance.us spun out of Binance.com, and because Binance.com did not conform to US regulatory regimes, everyone top to bottom is guilty as sin.

The lawsuit also uses the opportunity to go after specific IEO’s that binance hosted to say that they were unregistered securities, further muddying the waters on what that even means within the world of crypto.

There’s a lot of devil in the details. Feel free to sign up for the paid subscription to dig in!

Here’s the raw AI summary of the lawsuit.

Here’s the actual SEC filing.