Defendant in SEC Enforcement Action Counters that SEC Wasn't Supposed to be Working During the Shutdown

Trading Fintech Founder Sues SEC for Shutdown Enforcement Action

The SEC was hit with a lawsuit alleging it violated a federal spending law by pursuing an investigation and filing an enforcement action against the founder of a commodities trading fintech during the 43-day government shutdown.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation of Srinivas Koneru over several years didn’t involve any emergency threat to human life or property that would justify continuing the probe during the shutdown under the Anti-Deficiency Act, the former executive of Triterras Inc. said in a complaint filed Sunday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Leave the Gold in the Ground

NatBridge Resources Ltd. is a gold mining company listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. From its public filings, it seems that NatBridge has acquired various rights to parcels of land that contain gold, but it has never mined any gold. NatBridge has a better idea. […]

The theory seems to be that you get a technical report saying that your parcel contains gold — “Parcels 45 and 46 comprise approximately 12,290,139 tonnes containing an aggregate of 122,211 ounces of indicated gold resources, and 6,650 ounces of inferred gold resources at a 0.005 oz/ton cutoff grade” — and then you mint digital tokens representing that amount of gold.

And then you sell those tokens to, uh. To people who want digital tokens representing a certain amount of gold….

Million-Dollar Lawyers are the Next Winners in PE’s Big 401(k) Push

Financial advisers say average investors should tread carefully when weighing whether to add private assets to their retirement mix. There’s no guarantee future investment returns will justify the industry’s high fees.

Lawyers, however, can bill today. Legal fees for the structuring and paperwork of a simple private-markets fund for retail investors can sometimes be as much as $1.5 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Ongoing legal work can amount to hundreds of thousands a year.

Wall Street lawyers say they’ve never seen anything quite like this. Fund specialists — who once set up far less lucrative mutual funds and exchange-traded funds and were snubbed by some of the big firms — are now so coveted that pay can stretch into seven digits, people close to the firms say. Ho-hum legal work like going through fund regulations and preparing prospectuses suddenly looks like a growth business.

VanEck CEO Raises Concerns About Bitcoin’s Encryption and Privacy

Van Eck said the issues drawing attention inside the Bitcoin community go beyond short-term market swings. “There’s something else going on within the Bitcoin community that non-crypto people need to know about,” he said.

He added that VanEck evaluates Bitcoin’s staying power the same way it assesses traditional assets. “Ultimately, VanEck has been around before Bitcoin. We will walk away from Bitcoin if we think the thesis is fundamentally broken. We don’t right now, but you always have to look at the underlying technology and the crypto.”

He did not define what he meant by “the Bitcoin thesis,” but his comments pointed toward the foundations that support Bitcoin’s long-term viability, including the strength of its cryptography, the network’s readiness for advances in quantum computing and whether its privacy model aligns with user expectations. His remarks centered on whether Bitcoin has “enough encryption” and “enough privacy,” which he said were now central questions for parts of the Bitcoin community.